Old Bell System Payphone Sign. Shillelagh Tavern.

Old payphone signs have a way of lingering, idling over a spot where a payphone once stood, or outside a business which used to have a payphone.

This old sign for a Bell System Public Telephone hovers over a payphone-free slice of sidewalk, outside the Shillelagh Tavern in Astoria.

Shillelagh has no payphone inside, either, making this sign at first appear to be not just useless but mis-leading. I have been frustrated in recent times to see signs which appear to signal the presence of a payphone. More often than not I reach these locations and find no phones, just a set of spikes in the sidewalk where the payphones once stood.

This sign probably dates from the 1960s. Old, I suppose, but the New York Telephone Company/American Telephone & Telegraph Co. sign I saw last year is certainly older.

The old payphone sign is not entirely misleading, though. This is probably just accidental, but there is a working payphone near this sign, on the other side of the sidewalk. Its number is Astoria 8-9604, or (718) 278-9604 in post-exchange-name parlance.