UPDATE: 4/10/2020. Thanks to a comment from “YES” I now know this payphone is a Hearing Aid Compatible WP1000 Display Payphone. It is up for grabs on eBay.

I found this odd looking specimen of abandoned payphonery hiding in a laundromat with no name on Corona Avenue in Elmhurst, Queens. Compared to most payphones in these parts it felt flimsy, and all-in-all it just looked different from the usual Elcotel or Protel models that set the standard. The phone’s wire appears to still be connected to a landline phone jack, but the phone itself is dead. Like the laundromat in which it lingers the phone has no name or signage to show who might have owned this device. From the looks of its design it is possible it never did.

The existence of an LCD screen would put this phone in the category of “Smart” pay telephones, a class of payphones that flooded the country in the mid-1980s. This was after deregulation of AT&T’s payphone monopoly let anyone and everyone get it on the business, and all kinds of sheisty manufacturers of inferior payphones were among the stampede of “entrepreneurs” who got in on the fun. Phones such as this were ostensibly developed to improve upon the Bell systems’ “dumb” phones. An LCD screen like this would display calling instructions, rates, a countdown timer showing how much time you had left on your call, and other stuff relevant to a pay-as-you-go caller. Maybe the LCD screen is where the name of the company that owned this phone was found.

The handset receiver looks more like something you’d see on an office phone instead of a public payphone. The notches on the phone’s body indicate this phone got some abuse, so maybe it is not as flimsy as it felt to me.

The earpiece and all its once-hidden innards are gone, not that anyone should expect to make calls through this phone were it present. But then maybe this phone is salvageable. Some months ago I found that a payphone in the Times Square subway station, the handset of which looked a lot like this one, was actually able to make outgoing calls.

The laundromat where I found this phone does have a name. Finding it was not as easy as one might expect. It is the Elmcor Laundromat, according to NYBIZDB.com, a site which lists Elmcor’s phone number as (718) 699-9872. Interestingly (to me, that is), that number happens to be listed on this website’s data museum of payphone locations past and present (mostly past). The address shown on the old listing page could not ever have existed but still, its presence in the old database provides enough evidence to suggest that the payphone at Elmcor Laundromat formerly doubled as the house phone, and its number was 718-699-9872. I put the number into Twilio’s Number Lookup and their data seems to confirm that the number does or once did connect to a payphone, but as usual with Twilio no location information is available.

The laundromat’s façade gives nothing away about its name, with no visible signage that I could detect. Neither Bing nor Google have a name for the place either, which is only a little weird. Seen in the reflection of Elmcor’s windows is the bright face of the Geeta Temple, easily the standout structure along this otherwise drab stretch of road. The Geeta Temple out-oranges the candy-corn-colored pylon across the street from it. That pylon, incidentally, covers the spot where a couple of payphones used to stand.

Also of note in this area is a sizable work of graf art on the side of a building on 92nd Street. I could not quite line up a clear shot of this without wires or a sign getting in the way but you get the idea.

The real hidden gem on this stretch of Corona Avenue in Elmhurst is not the weird looking payphone at the no-name Laundromat. It’s this place, the Thomas Ventures Flea Market at 92-03 Corona Avenue. It doesn’t look like much at a glance, and the company website is a disaster, but step inside this place and you’ll find seemingly endless floorspace rambling from one expansively-stocked department to another. I didn’t get any photos inside, since I’ve been either yelled at or even ejected from some places of business for doing that. But if you’re in this part of Elmhurst don’t let this unassuming looking place escape you. The sign says “Flea Market” but it’s really more of a bargain warehouse/department store with one of the most enormous gumball machines I have ever seen.