37th Avenue Between 31st Street and northern Boulevard in Astoria, Queens, will soon get something I don’t think it has ever had: Billboards. Electronic billboards, that is, in the form of LinkNYC monoliths which are replacing New York City’s thousands of public pay telephones.

You can tell if a LinkNYC device with its forward-facing camera is coming to your living room window by the appearance of a 5- or 6-digit number and what looks like a ¢ sign painted on the sidewalk.

You will also see this bit of sidewalk graffiti at the base of existing payphones that will be replaced by Links. The number is (I assume) a unique identifier for each LinkNYC unit, similar to how every outdoor public pay telephone (PPT) is assigned a unique 6-digit NYC PPT ID on its façade:

The color of the paint on the sidewalks is, incidentally, not arbitrary. As reported by Smithsonian.com and other sources there is a system behind the color coding of street and sidewalk graffiti. In this case the use of white paint indicates that excavation is planned.

The expected locations for almost all of these Links are at spots where no payphone had ever existed. This seems to indicate that CityBridge is making good on its threat to plague the city with as many as 10,000 of these things, a quantity far in excess of a payphone population said to have been 6,169 about a year ago. That number comes from the NYC.gov map of Public Pay Telephone Locations, a resource which has become something of a data museum as payphones are routed to make way for LinkNYC advertising kiosks. The figure of 6,169 payphones is inflated but by how much I’m not able to determine. The dataset is littered with phantom payphone locations that either never existed or were removed many years ago.

The only outdoor payphones I remember on that stretch of 37th Avenue were clamshell units free of advertising. Among the so-far-unfulfilled promises made by CityBridge was that certain residential-only areas would be spared the giant LED screens and given pared-down LinkNYC devices with tablets but no advertising. It doesn’t look like that will happen. This part of 37th Avenue is not purely residential but the fact that there were never any advertising-cloaked payphone enclosures makes me question if zoning regulations prohibit some forms of advertising there. Whatever the case until the Links arrive it remains surprisingly free of almost any kind of advertising.

The only phones I remember from this piece of road were curbside at 33rd Street and building line at 34th Street. There was also an indoor payphone at Georgia’s Restaurant, which was removed when it changed over to the Merit Deli. There’s your 37th Avenue payphone time capsule report.