As the LinkNYC rollout continues to stagnate it is worth noting that the quantity of kiosks installed but never activated, currently hovering at 52 (according to CityBridge data), is further accompanied by an unknown number of orange plywood pylons marking spots where kiosks were supposed to be installed. These wood husks, some in place so long that they have begun to disintegrate, litter sidewalks throughout New York with rotted wood, sharp nails, graffiti, and promises of “Super fast, free Wi-Fi coming soon!”. Will these pylons, which could have been interpreted as makeshift, temporary tombstones for the payphones they replaced, instead end up as preëmptive tombstones for the Smart City “revolution”?

In some cases they cover the unfinished and potentially dangerous remnants of a payphone not fully removed, with the functional part of the payphone structure taken away but some portion of the base needing further attention for full removal. In other cases pylons cover the initial installation of a kiosk’s base and foundational innards, as seen in this story from July, 2016.

NYC’s Open Data portal publishes a dataset claiming to list locations where permits for new LinkNYC kiosks had been approved but not yet installed. That sounds like data which would reflect locations of these wood pylons but, with only one location listed, that clearly is not the case. Thus, the quantity and locations of these hunks of Smart City road wart is not known.

I have spotted at least a dozen of these so a lot more than that must exist. This one on Thomson Avenue in Queens has moldered away long enough to achieve Street View immortality. The Street View image, compared to the photo below, illustrates how the elements and the passage of time turn these pylons into blight.

Other useless structures litter the city’s sidewalks, such as the thousands of red emergency call boxes, many of which are decapitated or otherwise rendered useless, despite a federal court order for the City to keep them active and maintained.

If you start to look for it you might also start to notice a conspicuous quantity of payphone enclosures from which the payphones have been removed, leaving structures serving as nothing more than advertising pillars. CityBridge, the company responsible for depositing these wood pylons onto the sidewalks, also owns those empty payphone enclosures.

But those structures are relatively benign. Some of these rotted pylons have nails sticking out of them, and the splintered wood on some of them presents obvious hazards.