Outside a ZAP car wash and oil change place in Sunset Park I spotted the remains of a payphone left to rot by a company called Northeastern Telecom. From all the way across 4th Avenue I could tell the shriveled, humbled handset was smashed and that this was yet another abandoned payphone littering the city. This phone has probably been on this spot for over 15 years.
It happens to be on private property, so it would be up to the owners of the place to get rid of it. But that assumes they want to get rid of it. Who wouldn’t want a conversation piece like this huddling in a crevice at their place of work?
No contact information for Northeastern Telecom appears on this phone, making me ask if this device once belonged to the company today called NortheastTel, based in Louisiana. That company is listed on the FCC website but the names are different enough to suggest they are unrelated. I can’t help ask why a company located in Louisiana calls itself “Northeastern”, “North” anything. Louisiana is definitely in the southern part of the U.S.
Whether today’s NortheastTel once owned this phone is not important enough for me to pick up the phone and call them to ask. But it’s interesting to find remains of yet another of the countless independent payphone service providers that did business in New York and seem to have slipped away from meaningful documentation. For however many thousands of payphone pictures I’ve taken in the city I made little effort until later years to document these informational placards, which are supposed to tell you who owns the phone and how to contact them with complaints.
