Looking For Religion In A Payphone

There is a lot more religion on the upper east side than most people realize. That’s because it is subliminal, and virtually hidden in the contours of a surface most of us give only a passing glance, if even that much regard.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I had randomly discovered religious scratchiti on a few upper east side payphones and that I presumed it to be the work of PRAY. I spotted two or three of the etchings, which had seemingly materialized before my eyes in the metal surface of a curbside enclosure as I was making a payphone call.

On returning to the area last week I found that while the same message was not found on every single payphone, as the legend goes, it was on enough of them to suggest that at one time it did in fact appear on every one. On further observation I found the message on over a dozen upper east side payphones and in other parts of town, including Park Avenue South and in Astoria, and the search continues. As demonstrated in my previous story I have had the hardest time getting photos that clearly show the etchings within these enclosures, but this video, with the aid of a flashlight, makes it clearer, even if the glare from the flashlight is a little annoying (I’m no film-maker):

A couple of weeks ago, strangely enough, en route to Sunset Park to find PRAY on what is left of that area’s payphones, I found myself sitting right in front of what looks to me like the real thing, but on the D train, not in a payphone. It is jarring for me to see this sort of thing since it reminds me what an impact it had on me back in the early 1990s, when I was a bit more religious-minded and lightly plagued with lapsed-Catholic guilt over having not yet made it to a church in New York. At the time I found the churches to be enormous and intimidating, and seemingly intended for the wealthy.

These “GO TO CHURCH” discoveries have inspired me not just to seek out more of PRAY’s payphone scratchiti while it still exists but also to to delve deeper into the story of PRAY. I don’t expect to reach any conclusions different from those of others: We don’t know who she was, if she acted alone or with a posse, or if any record of her identity exists in some as-yet undiscovered diary or other personal record.

I lean toward thinking she acted alone, but that might just be my sympathies at work. I prefer the idea of the loner, obsessively driven in their pursuit but absent in and oblivious to the impact of their message’s delivery. It also seem that doing this with a team would make it tempting for someone involved to come forward with the secret after her death. But, again, who knows?

In the September, 1989 issue of Spy magazine Max Cantor, perhaps satirically, perhaps only semi-seriously stated that this was the work of a group of people, not an individual. How, Cantor implicitly asked, could one person possibly be responsible for so much writing on so many surfaces from the Bronx to Coney Island? I’d have to rifle through more copies of Spy to tell if a portion of that title’s pages were purely satirical while its better half was at least semi-realistic.

A couple of more realistic but differing theories appear in “Getting Up“, Craig Castleman’s 1982 summary history of graffiti in New York up to that time. From a wino living in a doorway on Eight Street to a former nurse at Bellevue who lost her mind the focus turns to graffiti artist Bama, who is among the few to have actually met PRAY, though the encounter did not get too far:

There is more research to be done here, which will involve a visit or two to the research library. Stay tuned.