When a friend first directed me to it I thought 80s.nyc sounded like something to inspire a long, rambling dream sequence from Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, the great Ben Katchor series of comics that have been on my desk or coffee table almost continuously since I found them in the early 1990s.

I spent several hours binge-clicking on the maps at 80s.nyc, a site which is essentially a Streetview of New York City from the 1980s. Taken for tax appraisal purposes the grainy photos provide what I found to be a poignantly artless window into the New York City I always heard about while growing up down in Florida. I’ve seen plenty of pictures from NYC in the 1980s, of course, but those are mostly professional quality work. The systematic and more or less uniform coverage of the city in the manner curated by the folks at 80s.nyc makes me happy to know that the rugged, earthy New York I’d heard about really was here all along. If I had more of a capacity for nostalgia it might make for a sad reminder that I mostly missed that iteration of New York by moving here in late 1990.

But for the purpose of this story I’m not talking about nostalgia or city-life might-have-beens. Sure, I’d like to think that the years I spent living near Lincoln Center working as a classical pianist with a full-time job paying $5/hour at a classical record store would still make a life in New York possible. But things change, and I am still happy to be here.

This story is about the payphones of 80s.nyc. I spent a couple of afternoons clicking on the maps of that website in search of payphones, phone booths, and certain other telephone and communication-related detritus such as red emergency call boxes and advertisements containing phone numbers in the old telephone exchange name format. At first I was surprised how few payphones I found in these pictures, especially in Manhattan. The 1980s were, after all, considered a heyday for public telephones in New York and throughout the country as deregulation allowed mushroom-like proliferation of payphones owned by non-Bell System independent payphone service providers, better known as COCOTs (Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephones). But in New York City that proliferation did not really start until the later 1980s, and COCOTs did not reach outdoor curbside locations in any notable quantity until even later.

Another reason there are so few payphones to be seen at 80s.nyc is because of how so many of the photos were shot. The sidewalk-level area in front of many buildings either is not included in the frame or else it is covered by street address information printed on the photo itself. This photo of 711 3rd Avenue illustrates the point, as do countless other photos throughout 80s.nyc:

I’m not saying that there were payphones outside 711 Third Avenue in the 1980s. I wouldn’t know. This photo is just one example among hundreds of photos in this series that would not have captured such a trifling piece of street furniture as a curbside payphone.

Still, a bit of perseverance turned up a few gems, some of which I have enhanced a bit on Photoshop. Certainly there are more old phone booths and payphones lurking in these images from the 1980s.

Here is one nearly-perfect example of a full-size enclosed phone booth, though it seems to lack a closing door:

Note that every image here links to the page where I found it at 80s.nyc. Sometimes you have to scroll one way or the other on the top part of the screen to see that the image originated at that link, but a lot of times the locations on the map versus the addresses printed on the photos themselves don’t make sense, at least not to me. In this case the location on the map appears to be 54th Street while the address on the photo is for Metropolitan Avenue, a few blocks away. It doesn’t much matter, does it, since few if any of these phones are likely to still exist. The booth seen above certainly does not.

Moving to Brooklyn, look for a dude on the far right talking on a Gerritsen Avenue payphone:

Three payphones in a row at Herald Square, bottom left corner. Payphones standing by amidst the crowd, street furniture ignored by most until they actually need one. Oh, wait. Someone actually is using one of these. At first I thought the middle phone was missing its handset but no, as was common in the 1980s, someone was actually using the thing. It’s a bit grainy but he’s in there, yakkin’ it up on the payphone.

Here are two in a row showing the same dude using a payphone on Bay Street in Staten Island. Three signs outside the vending store advertise the presence of payphones, including the word “TELEPHONES” seen prominently over the front door. Back then having a couple of payphones outside (or inside) your business was seen as a way to draw customers in and, even if they don’t buy anything at your store, you might make a few bucks from the coins fed into the phones — if they were COCOTs.

Last phone for now, and maybe a little hard to see, but in the middle of the photo on the sidewalk is a payphone outside of what appears to be a Kentucky Fried Chicken in The Bronx. The problem with this photo is the address does not make sense for where it appears on the map. There is no Third Avenue in the area, or anywhere else in The Bronx, as far as I can tell.

Last bit for now, this time not involving a payphone. This photo captures a sign bearing a phone number in the old-style telephone exchange name format. The number, AD 1-1111, would have been ADirondack 1-1111, which today translates into 718-231-1111. That number today is owned by Anmike Management. I couldn’t tell you if it’s the same company with a different name and a new location but the continuity in Anmike being a taxi company, same as the place in the photo below appeared to be, suggests it is. But what’s most interesting about this photo is the lingering appearance of the ADirondack telephone exchange phone number. I still see these around once in a while, most recently in the form of ULster 2-6036 number in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn.