Job Opening: Payphone Technician

I spotted a couple of signals to suggest that payphones in NYC will not disappear completely anytime soon: New display advertisements still being sold on some remaining payphone enclosures, and Intersection, the company of which CityBridge is a part, just posted a job opening for a payphone technician.

Ongoing maintenance of existing payphones ceased completely after the pandemic lockdown went into effect, with an assumption among those in the know that this scenario would be permanent. Evidently this course has reversed, as Intersection has put the job of keeping New York’s pay telephones in working order back up for grabs.

What quantity of payphones might survive, and for for how long, remains to be seen. How much money a payphone enclosure makes from advertising revenue is the likeliest factor in deciding which phones stay, meaning high-visibility areas with lots of eyeballs would still have payphones while more isolated areas would not.

That pattern, if it evolves as such, would mirror that of the LinkNYC rollout, in which communities that might benefit most from the free WiFi ad other services offered by the kiosks don’t get them, while more advertiser-friendly areas in which residents can afford their own Internet access do.

I never believed the media reportage from late February and early March announcing that every last payphone in New York would be taken out ASAP. It’s not just the logistical impossibility of routing 3,000 of these things all at once that raised my doubts. It was also because the head of DoITT announced in early March that only “hundreds” of payphones would be slaughtered. With 3,000 payphones remaining ordering only “hundreds” removed implied survivors.

It’s never been made clear why the LinkNYC rollout stagnated, or if it will ever resume its stampede of the old payphones. The NYC Open Data portal has some datasets which supposedly show how many new LinkNYC permit applications CityBridge has filed. According to those datasets no new requests have been made in 2 years. The dataset listing LinkNYC locations that have been approved but where no kiosk has yet been installed lists only one location.

As for ads being sold on the old payphones I can only by observation, but this phone, at 31st Street near 36th Avenue in Astoria, recently had whatever ad was there before replaced with this one, for SpareRoom.com. A nearby phone, on 36th Avenue, also has new display ads on its panels. Today I spotted a fresh ad on the phone up at 31st Street and 23rd Avenue. I haven’t paid enough attention to other phones to comment but it seems like the payphone advertising business carries on.

With payphones still outnumbering LinkNYC kiosks it would be interesting to know which product makes more money from advertising, the kiosks or the phones. Payphone enclosures have three static ad panels, the Link kiosks only two dynamic screens, with blink-and-you’ll-miss-them ads competing with artwork, third grade poetry, PSAs, and other content that makes money for nobody.

If ads are being sold on these payphone enclosures that would seem to suggest they will stick around for a while. In my daily travels I honestly think I see more ads on payphone enclosures than on LinkNYC kiosks, which make 100% of their revenue from ads but seem to show far more artwork and PSAs than ads.