Lower Manhattan Payphones Revisited

If (516) 243-3858‬ showed up on your CallerID it probably means someone called you from this payphone, across the street from the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC New York), Manhattan’s maximum security prison at 150 Park Row. MCC New York is where El Chapo was held, and where Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself.

The number shown on the phone, 212-962-9835, listed on this page from the payphone data museum, does not match the ANI returned when calling MCI’s 1-800-444-4444.

The number printed on the phone, which translates back to WOrth 2-9835 in the old telephone exchange name format, is now disconnected. This is true for virtually all New York City payphones, since their connections were converted from copper landline to Verizon wireless some years ago. With the move to wireless it seems porting the old numbers was too much trouble, and given a dearth of available (212) numbers the (516) and (646) area codes were used instead. In many cases, like this one, the old numbers printed on the phones remain.

The payphone near the prison led me to consider what phones might have been inside the MCC New York compound. I looked up its address, 150 Park Row, in my payphone data museum of mostly defunct payphone numbers and locations. The jail at one time housed at least 35 payphones, all of them in the same 212-962 WOrth exchange as this payphone outside. I don’t think any of these numbers work today.

I would not know if these payphones were intended for use by prisoners or visitors, or if MCC New York had, for its prison population, deployed coinless, collect-call-only phones commonly found in prisons today. This data would have been current as of the late 1990s.

Whither MCC New York?

I had, happy to say, no prison-related reason to be in the area yesterday. I ended up there after a trip on the M15 bus from midtown to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal thrice got interrupted by the drivers unexpectedly announcing “This is the last stop” and ordering all riders to exit the bus and wait for another.

After being thus ejected from a bus at Allen and East Houston Streets I decided I’d walk the rest of the way to the ferry terminal. En route I scouted out the area to see if New York’s payphone apocalypse had reached that part of Lower Manhattan.

Payphones have vanished at a rapid clip in some parts of New York, replaced not with LinkNYC kiosks, the much-heralded “payphone of the future” that promised to bridge the digital divide, but with enigmatic yellow mats that may or may not signal some other piece of street furniture will replace the payphones of yore.

If you see one or more of these it means at least one payphone formerly stood on that spot. As I documented last week, in one case five phones in a row, the most outdoor payphones at one location anywhere in the five boroughs, disappeared from Junction Boulevard near 59th Avenue in Queens:

Outdoor payphones of Lower Manhattan, by my survey, appear to be holding on, with no yellow mats littering the sidewalks and payphones still standing in the same relatively generous quantities as they have for several years. Some have dial tone, others do not, but I made no systematic survey of how many phones actually worked.

Pike Street Payphone: 212-766-8650

This phone, at the southeast corner of Pike Street and East Broadway, is an example of the oldest style of outdoor payphone enclosure still standing in New York. Note the operative word: Outdoor. Much older phone booths still linger, safe from the elements inside places such as libraries, old bars, and office buildings.

These enclosures, with the black, boxy frame, originally had no advertising panels. You can see in this photo how the ad panels are not part of the original construction. While the structure itself is essentially the same as ever the phone itself has been swapped out, probably numerous times, over the years.

If you look through enough pictures of New York in the 1980s you’ll find examples of this style of enclosure before the introduction of ad panels. A funny photo by Carrie Boretz, found on this page at the 6sqft website, shows a man attempting to use an evidently out of order payphone. It also shows what payphone enclosures like the one on Pike Street looked like before the ads.

The appearance of advertising on the city’s payphones goes back to the mid-1980s, when New York Telephone started slapping ads on its money-losing payphones, in an effort to actually make them a sustainable business. It worked, and the ads stayed on payphone enclosures to this day, subsidizing the payphones themselves.

This essentially makes payphone enclosures such as the one at Pike Street an ancestor of LinkNYC, the payphone replacement that earns its revenue entirely from ads. You can read more about that in my earlier story: LinkNYC: How Did We Get Here?

The number printed on the Pike Street phone, 212-766-8650, appears on this page, from the payphone data museum.

 

Payphone at the 169 Bar: 212-473-9453

This phone, outside the 169 Bar on East Broadway near Rutgers Street, needs a cleanup more than it needs a dial tone. The number printed on the phone, 212-473-9453, is disconnected, and does not appear on this site’s data museum.

Enclosures like this, with the ad panels already built in, would have started appearing in the mid- to late-1990s and later into the 2000s. This makes it less likely my databases would have information on the original locations.

These and maybe a couple dozen other phones remain in Lower Manhattan, with sightings at Broad and South Streets, around Water and Whitehall Streets, and so on. I also surveyed 1st and 2nd Avenues as far up as 57th Street, observing from bus windows dozens of payphones still standing on those avenues.