O’Hare Airport Has Payphones. Lots Of Them.

Val Vashon, who has shared several payphone photos from across America with The Payphone Project, checks in again with word that as of about a year ago Chicago’s O’Hare airport had a lot of payphones, far more than one might expect in the age of the cell phone. All these phones are (or were) owned by PTS (Pacific Telemanagement Services), the nation’s largest payphone service provider.

Banks of payphones in sets of four or eight were found throughout the airport, not just in one terminal.

A bank of eight payphones at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

A small number of metal panels indicate that payphones have been removed, but the number of extant phones at O’Hare greatly outnumbered those that had been removed.

I tried calling this phone at (773) 601-9855 but it seems to have been disconnected. Val Vashon found that all the phones at O’Hare appeared to take incoming calls, though the ringing sound is quite faint an unlikely to be heard from very far away.

ACTION SHOT! Val Vashon caught this payphone customer talking it up on an O’Hare Airport payphone.

Click here to see Val Vashon’s other contributions to The Payphone Project.