Manhattan’s Last Outdoor Phone Booths: What’s The Deal?

I had to return a television set top box to Verizon at their retail store on Broadway and 101st Street in Manhattan. The intersection of 101st Street and Broadway happens to be one block east of West End Avenue, where the last outdoor phone booths of New York City are located. Soooo, I ambled over to see how those gawky pillars were faring.

Unlike their predecessors I remain ambivalent about today’s West End Avenue phone booths. Today’s booths exist as an oddball, social-media-gawky decision by the CityBridge monopoly to replace the last outdoor Airlight style phone booths of Manhattan with — what else? —  Canadian models.  Why such a deep-pocketed entity like CityBridge could not procure authentic American style phone booths is something I lack clearance to ask of such a secretive society as CityBridge. With its financial resource it is hard to believe the consortium could not come up with the money to either refurbish the Airlight booths of yore or take the low road and purchase so-called “Superman Telephone Booths” from the likes of payphone.com or eBay.

New York’s only outdoor phone booths were shipped from Canada and refurbished by the Clark Specialty company in Bath, New York. I don’t know what the booths looked like before but Clark Specialty seems to have done fine work in making them presentable. Still, given their intended use as historical reminders of New York’s payphone past I can’t let it go that this style of booth has never been found in New York City.

It was said that these booths were installed out of respect for their “historic aspects”. This implied that their presence should evoke a sense of nostalgia among New Yorkers of a certain age, I guess?

Nostalgia for what? Montreal? These booths might as well have been crowned with logos for Bell Canada and/or Telus, two companies that operate thousands of payphones across Canada. There is nothing New York or even American about these phone booths. Film-maker Alex Kliment took me aside and said these phone booths looked like “shower stalls”.

It is not something with which most people would concern themselves. A phone booth is a phone booth, right? Maybe, but with regards to phone booths I am not most people. I had an enduring interest in the NYC Airlight booths of yore, but my apathy about the newer CityBridge replacements has made it hard to motivate myself to go even slightly out of my way to see them, or even to write this story. I am trying here.

Still, I have to ask if these folks at CityBridge who claim such respect for and knowledge of the historical relevance of NYC phone booths have any idea what they are talking about.

Regardless of their historic ambiguity I had a couple of reasons to see these booths again, and it so happened they were right on my way.

The booths are located on West End Avenue, at the corners of 66th, 90th, 100th, and 101st Streets. Before the Canadian models were installed the booths were of the classic Airlight style once commonly seen in NYC and from sea to shining sea across the United States.

One such booth, located in Arkansas, made headlines when the U.S. National Park Service added it to its National Register of Historic Places. That was in November, 2015, just months before these Canadian booths replaced the American models on West End Avenue.

I doubt if anyone will be adding CityBridge’s Canadian imports to any U.S. historic registries.

An intriguing feature of these four booths is that local calls from the phones within are free within the five borough of New York City, no coins needed. This strange attempt at a public relations stunt by CityBridge probably captured the attention of absolutely nobody, since the existence of this little perk is not indicated anywhere on the phones or booths. It would be interesting to know how many coins are collected from callers unaware the phones are programmed to allow free calls.

This ability to make free calls from the city’s last phone booths was one of my reasons for wanting to check in on these phones. I had reason to think the feature no longer worked a few months ago, when I ambled past the phone booth at 66th Street. Dialing a local number from that phone returned an automated voice instructing me to deposit 25¢. Calls from this phone seemed to no longer be free! I thought maybe the perk had been disabled at the other three booths as well. I had no time to go up to the other booths that day but I made a mental note to take a look the next time it made sense to go over there.

Free local calls are still possible from three of the four phone booths on West End Avenue. It turns out the phone at 66th Street simply does not work at all. It has been that way for months. It took my quarter, which I guess I won’t be getting back, but here is what a call from that phone sounded like:

I could be a concerned and proactive citizen and report this matter of a non-working, quarter-gobbling payphone. I could call 311 or CityBridge. But my well-intentioned attempts at reporting things like this to 311 have almost always been a waste of time, and the latter corporate behemoth is too busy scheming money from advertisers to acknowledge such reports from riff-raff like me (or you).

I said this, as an aside:

Since local calls from these phones are supposed to be free you might think their coin slots would be covered to prevent people from needlessly depositing coins. This is not done because that would make it impossible to make coin-fed non-local calls, which are charged at standard long distance rates.

As for the old Airlight style booths that used to inhabit West End Avenue there is no question they were in bad shape. The one on 66th in particular was a nasty vertical coffin of remonstrance covered with graffiti, rust, and stains to explain. Still, it is not crazy to think those booths, like the Canadian imports, could have been refurbished.

In fact they were refurbished, just not by CityBridge or Clark Specialty. For a couple of months three of the four Airlight booths that used to inhabit West End Avenue were brought back to life in Times Square as part of an art project called Once Upon a Place, by Afghan-American artist Aman Mojadidi. The respectable craftsmanship by the artist in restoring those booths to something sorta-kinda like their original form makes it evident that CityBridge, with (one assumes) vastly deeper financial resources than Mr. Mojadidi, could have done something similar to preserve the “historic aspects” of New York City phone booths.

Another reason I wanted to pass by these booths again was to check to see if the booths at 90th, 100th, and 101st Streets were actually still there. The possibility that three of the booths might have for some reason been destroyed arose when I saw this printed note on the phone booth at 66th Street:

I do not know who placed this strip of text but I do know, as illustrated by the photos of the other three phone booths at the top of this story, that this notice is not accurate.

Someone, presumably from the neighborhood, seems to think this structure is the one and only phone booth in Manhattan.

It might seem a little mean to take a dump on someone’s neighborhood pride over something so harmless. But the next time I am in that area I will try to remember to bring a pen, paper, and piece of tape which I can use to politely post a fact check addendum to this note: “This is not true.” And for that matter this style of phone booth structure is not even relevant in the history of New York City phone booths.

Plenty of old phone booths still exist in New York. What makes the West End Avenue booths distinctive is that they are the last fully enclosed, outdoor, and fully functioning booths located in Manhattan. Although come to think of it the “fully enclosed” claim needs a footnote: Two of the four Canadian booths on West End Avenue have no doors.

Countless other phone booths, some of them still in use, linger indoors at places like older pubs, restaurants, libraries, and various hidden spaces. I documented some of them here, and expect to continue that pursuit of sharing old phone booth photos that I find in my wanderings.

One possible challenge to the claim that the West End Avenue booths are the last outdoor structures of their kind in Manhattan could come from considering the K6 British Phone Box at the 50th Street entrance to 437 Madison Avenue. The fact that it is not even an American style booth shouldn’t matter in a context where Canadian models have been deemed historically meaningful by CityBridge.

But the K6 structure does not contain any kind of telephone. That makes it nothing more than a booth, not a phone booth. Boo! I am smiling some now, and I hope you are, too. Boo!