Most people passing these orange pylons, which further gummed up traffic on an already messy snow day, would probably pay them no mind or else have no idea what they are. These appear to be foundational materials for a couple of new LinkNYC devices, adding to the hundreds installed so far throughout the city.
The LinkNYC advertising platters are replacing old payphones throughout New York. Produced by the CityBridge consortium of media and tech companies the quantity of these devices has been threatened to reach as high as 10,000 in the coming decade. I was hoping my neighborhood might be spared these monoliths for the foreseeable future but no such luck. Seen on Broadway in Astoria these appear to be the first Links to raid that neighborhood of Western Queens. Given their sometimes ludicrous proliferation in other parts of the city we could expect dozens upon dozens of these beasts to line the sidewalks of Astoria, blinking a tidal wave of the advertisements you crave 24 hours a day.
The above LinkNYC device, at Broadway near 31st Street, will replace a payphone that had advertising panels on it already. The fact that LinkNYC advertising will replace locations where billboards were already present has been cited by CityBridge in attempts to assuage complaints that the new Links will be little more than advertising-heavy eyesores. Well, so were the payphones they are replacing…not that we needed thousands upon thousands of those either. But the payphone enclosures’ outer panels did not blink (with one exception of a phone near Times Square) and calls made from payphones did not broadcast both sides of the conversation to passers-by.
The other Link, at 33rd Street (in the first picture above), brings advertising panels where there were none before. This Link will replace a couple of clamshell enclosures that had not contained working payphones for quite some time. They did, however, bear a puzzling advertisement for StreetMessages.com, a web site URL which does not belong to CityBridge and which instead is in the clutches of a domain name squatter.
It is not unusual among payphones to find brand names of telcos that exited the payphone business long ago. Verizon’s name still appears on countless NYC payphone even though they abandoned the world of owning and operating payphones years back. But most people don’t especially care who owns or operates a payphone, just so it works. In the case of leaving the StreetMessages.com address, and even recently (as I noticed last week) adding that website URL to existing phones, it just seems like a mistake someone would actually want to fix.
StreetMessages.com is presently owned by a domain name collector and web site developer whose stable includes sites for massage parlors and Asian dating. Who is to say StreetMessages.com will not soon point to some such scandalous product, one which would benefit from all the free advertising it presently gets on hundreds of CityBridge’s old payphones?
An element of the LinkNYC that seems to have been scuttled was the promise of providing advertising-free kiosks with free Wi-Fi for New Yorkers in purely residential areas. Zoning rules prohibit most forms of display advertising in residential areas, and since the 1980s (when ads first appeared on NYNEX payphones) those rules had been applied to payphone installations. by extension the rules apply to LinkNYC kiosks as well.
Instead of Link devices with the 2 panels of advertising a slimmer model was promised, as seen in this rendering formerly found on the Link.NYC web site:
The above image no longer appears on the Link.NYC web site. Here is another early rendering from LinkNYC, showing what the slimmed-down model intended for residential areas would look like compared to its advertising-breathing brethren:
Those images are from early LinkNYC planning from 2014 or earlier. According to a more recent piece in DNAINFO.com (October, 2016) the Links “will not be installed in purely residential areas.” If that statement means what it sounds like then CityBridge’s earlier promise to blanket every street and byway of New York with free Wi-Fi will not be honored.
Most famously the LinkNYC devices no longer include a web browser, which was an instant hit as an entertainment center for the homeless, the poor, and those among us who cannot afford or maintain Internet access of our own. The use of the poor as pawns in this game of advertising-first corporate brinksmanship was one of the more depressing upshots of LinkNYC’s ambitious but poorly-planned “BETA” rollout. One day I was seeing folks in their easy chairs, bopping out to music or watching NBA highlights. The next day they were all gone. What was possibly the only steady Internet access some of these folks ever had was just summarily taken away. The whole sorry episode never should have been allowed to happen. The web browser probably never should have been there in the first place, but to me that does not subtract from the exploitation factor.
Seeing (and hearing) people make phone calls on these gadgets also just makes me shake my head. Anybody in earshot can hear both sides of the conversation, a nuisance which could become quite bothersome to anyone unlucky enough to have a LinkNYC device placed right outside their bedroom window.
Alas, nothing can be done to stop the LinkNYC program. It is akin to the geyser-like rise of deregulated payphones in the 1980s. The general public generally did not want payphones deregulated but the move was thrust upon us by FCC regulators and the thousands of entrepreneurs nationwide who saw fortunes being made in getting a piece of Ma Bell’s coin-fed phone business. As with the early deregulated payphone industry there is just too much money to be made by the small number of stakeholders behind LinkNYC for the program to relent — or so they have let themselves believe.