Manhattan Phone Booths Revisited. May, 2011.

I did not have much time to get these photos, and on account of the time-constraints I found myself nearly running up West End Avenue from 66th to 101st Street. The rushing around seemed strangely appropriate in light of the rapid decline of payphones. It’s like I was chasing payphone on this hot summer day, chasing after them before they disappear.

The old phone booths on West End Avenue are hanging in there. I first wrote about these booths on this web site in May, 2004. 7 years later I find that 2 of the booths (the ones at 66th Street and 90th Street) are showing their age, with rust overtaking the metal parts of the enclosures and unkempt stenches filling the little spaces. The phone booth at 66th Street has been arted up with advertising. The booths at 100th Street and 101st Street are in good shape. Their doors still open and close all the way, and the overhead light even works in one of them. All the booths are marred by graffiti, but that should come as no surprise. None of the payphones accept incoming calls.

These are not the last phone booths in New York City. These are the last outdoor, free-standing phone booths. Numerous indoor phone booths survive in restaurants and pubs throughout this town, and at places like the main branch of the New York Public Library, where old wood phone booths are present on the first and second floors and in the basement.

The Upper West Side (where these 4 outdoor phone booths are located) is also home to a set of phone booths the style of which I never expected to see in the wild. Retired to extinction decades ago I spotted these rare Manhattan phone booths at the 79th Street Boat Basin Café:

(Read and see more here.)

At 747 Third Avenue is what could be described as an outdoor phone booth. This is a structure I intend to investigate, for to learn who built it and why. That little booth is a work of art, using a public telephone in the same spirit as the Crazy Payphone at Queens Plaza and Vito Acconci’s Light Beams for the Sky of a Transfer Corridor at San Francisco Airport, among many others.

And now that summer is finally here I plan soon to re-visit Governors Island, to see if the lonely old phone booths on Yankee Pier, in Buttermilk Channel, are still standing. Those booths appear to have been abandoned long ago, and no public access was allowed the last time I visited the island, but this time around I might endeavor to see if a worker at the park would allow me access to the pier — that is, if the pier itself is even still there.

Once again, I find that I am chasing payphones.