Old Bell Seal Sign

Here is something I have not seen in a long time. In fact I don’t think I have ever seen a sign like this out in the wild. I spotted this old Bell Seal sign today in front of a store in Queens, probably indicating that there used to be a payphone nearby.

It is hard to know how long this pock-marked piece of signage has hovered over this place, but it could date back to the 1930s.

I get a little excited when I see vestiges of the past just sitting there in plain sight. Payphones themselves, while not on the verge of completely disappearing, are becoming so few and far between that they already feel like obscure relics from another time.

The sounds of the payphone, once an integral part of telephonic communication, also will fade into ephemera.

Those sounds include coins being deposited and further ingested into the mysterious innards of the phone, operators and automated messages interrupting calls to demand more money for the next three minutes, the hacking noise made when a payphone (or any landline phone) is left off the hook too long, and even the dial tone itself. The dial tone, that droning but affirming interval of a major third that was once a most fundamental beacon of telephony, has largely disappeared from the common experience of telephony.

I think payphones are monuments to the dial tone, and sometimes I pick up a payphone just to hear that blunt but comforting sound. When is the last time you heard a dial tone? Next time you see a payphone, pick it up and listen, just for some nostalgia.