“Midnight Cowboy” Phone Booths

The style of green Manhattan phone booths I spotted a few weeks ago are seen throughout the “Midnight Cowboy”, the 1969 film starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight.

The paper covering the payphone in the first of these booths (across from the Plaza Hotel) show how payphones in the 1960s were, like the payphones of the 21st century, often out of order.

This cluttered shot from inside a row of phone booths reminds me of this photo I took inside a Rockefeller Center Phone Booth.

If the Hotel Kimberly for Transients is the same Hotel Kimberly as today, then the place underwent a serious makeover. Today’s Hotel Kimberly is a 4½-star accommodation, according to TripAdvisor. Like the “Transients” sign, the phone booth outside is long gone. The Hotel Kimberly for Transients appears to be of the same vintage as the Parc Lincoln Hotel on West 75th Street in Manhattan where I stayed when I first moved to New York in 1990. The Parc Lincoln had a row of rotary dial phone booths which I frequented very … frequently. Today the space formerly occupied by those booths is taken by a very expensive dining establishment.

There are other phone booths seen in this film, but this set of screen-grans shows most of the old-style green booths seen in the film.

All the phone booths seen in “Midnight Cowboy” contain rotary dial payphones. Few rotaries survive today but you can still find them. The only surviving green Manhattan/NYC phone booths in use today that I know of are at the Boat Basin Café on West 79th Street.