As if stepping through a time-portal I found myself inside this hall of New York City phone booths. It was March, 2012, but it felt like the 1960s.
The public is not allowed to see these virtual antiquities. Because of that — and because I do not want to cause trouble for the gentleman who so graciously allowed me to see and photograph this payphone treasure — I will keep its location un-named, even as it may be obvious to some.
This is not an officially designated museum. I think it should be. I consider this an accidental art museum. It is a telephonic ghost town suspended in time right in the heart of one of the world’s most modern cities. I do not know if this row of booths is the very last of its vintage in New York City but it must be nearly unique.
These immaculate phone booths (most of which still contain payphones) stand in idle, useless tranquility in a corridor off the lobby of a Manhattan office building. As one would expect, none of the payphones work.
The overhead lights still warm these unused spaces but the fans do not spin and the telephone lines are completely dead.
Rows of booths like this used to be communications hubs. At some times of day every single phone would be in use. Then you had to wait in line to access a telephone and when you got your chance you had to keep your call as brief as possible. Imagine that!
Similar rows of booths at Rockefeller Center are all gone now. Those and other long-gone phone booths provided hiding places of sorts for me when I first moved to NYC in 1990. I’ve been payphone hunting a lot these days, and this discovery sent waves of tingly feelings all through my body. I’ve gotten used to finding dismembered hulks of payphones past, with antennae-like wires protruding and anthropomorphic faces (like this one) seemingly screaming in dismay at the removal of a public telephone:
This time I discovered stately and beautiful remains from the golden days of the public telephone. I stepped back in time to the early 1990s, remembering how I craved access to a telephone and spent hours huddled among rows of phone booths at Rockefeller Center, at the old Parc Lincoln on 75th Street near Amsterdam Avenue, at Lincoln Center, and at some branches of the New York Public Library.
As astonished as I was to find this accidental museum I should add that I have no sentimental memories of phone booths. Booths like these, contrary to what most nostalgians claim, were never particularly comfortable or even inviting. The fans rarely worked, causing a familiar clammy-handed feeling of clutching the phone with a sweaty palm. The collective noise of the conversations surrounding you sometimes bordered on cacophony. As some who has trouble filtering out sounds around me I have some unpleasant memories of hearing one side of desperate calls made from adjacent phone booths. And, of course, the odors and germs that gathered in these narrow spaces went nowhere good. On a number of occasions I swear I stepped into a phone booth feeling fine but stepped out feeling ill.
Yet the need for communication trumped the discomfort of the environment, at least for me.
Standing (or sitting) within these columns one commonly endured the stares and rat-a-tat-tats-on-the-phone-booth-glass of others waiting to use the phone. At some times of the day you could not talk long on a payphone without getting attitude for it. I remember hearing shouts of “payphone hog!” and “It’s a PUBLIC phone!” outside the Parc Lincoln phone booths.
Nevertheless, as someone with a special interest in real-world relics of old fashioned payphones and phone booths I stepped into this hall feeling like I had entered a magical promised land, a living memory of something I knew had existed but that I never thought I would see again. I spotted this corridor and gasped. I honestly could not believe my eyes.
I wanted to spend all day sitting among them but I only had 2 minutes to take in as much as I could. I exited the building, leaving these beautiful old booths to their silent oblivion.
This tableau may have been more elegiac if the payphones were rotary dial, and if the metal folders contained phone books. Alas, the phones were touchtone, and the phone book holders were empty. But I’m not complaining.
Like most indoor phone booths I expect that this space will one day be converted to a broom closet. I feel lucky to have seen it.
Click here for more pictures of these old fashioned phone booths.