Originally listed at 718-476-8903, this payphone has dial tone at the 90th Street/Elmhurst Avenue 7 train station. I got bumped into by a bunch of people yesterday while trying to use this payphone. Nobody paid me no mind.
A look back, in pictures and paean, at the last payphone in Grand Central subway station.
The formerly breakneck pace of new LinkNYC installations and activations is today characterized by empty advertising-only payphone enclosures, payphones removed with no replacement, and sidewalks littered with hunks of rotten plywood where promised LinkNYC kiosks have yet to appear.
Just a couple of pictures of another abandoned Verizon payphone. This one's on Manhattan Avenue in Brooklyn.
It's not that mailboxes are vanishing. Instead we are losing distinct stamps of age that showed how some humble little USPS dropboxes had been in place since the Eisenhower administration.
Access to 211, a community outreach service provided by the United Way, has been hijacked on a significant quantity of CityBridge payphones. Calls to 211 now connect to services promising gift vouchers and free vacations in exchange for taking a survey.
Maybe I should just give up. But I continue to question the MTA about the presence of an NYC WELL hotline phone on the RFK/Triborough Bridge. I simply cannot locate this phone.
This abandoned payphone enclosure got some beauty treatment from unknown parties. And also, an old telephone exchange name phone number nearby provided another vestige of old telephony.
Give credit when due to CityBridge, the company with a monopoly franchise on New York City's outdoor payphones. They do take care of their payphones.
It's still possible to get at Breakout or Doom through LinkNYC. Too bad you can't actually play the games.
Phone booth hunting in publicly posted college and high school yearbooks turned up some interesting stuff. Until the mid-2000s, if not beyond, most high school and college campuses had payphones of some sort, so their appearance in yearbooks seemed like a sure thing.
There is, as anyone would expect, an arted-up defunct payphone in a midtown Taco shop, positioned such that all visitors will encounter it. Its thick coat of pink paint matches the color of the shop's logo, but not much else about the phone seems to fit in to the décor.
It may not have been authentic PRAY, but I appreciated seeing one of my all-time New York City heroes get some respect at a Brooklyn street art exhibit.
LinkNYC's loudspeaker interface erases some of the most common maintenance headaches of the traditional payphones. But at what cost?
I felt a little duped by this film. I stuck with this movie because I figured a serial killer flick from the 1960s had to have at least one payphone or phone booth scene. Here it is.
I decided that getting emergency phones on the RFK/Triborough might be a cause worth pursuing after all. So i contacted the MTA and also upped the ante, if you will, by sending similar inquiries to NYCWELL, the city agency identified as responsible for the RFK's phantom 24 hour hotline phone.
Much of the enmity directed at a specific #ArtOnLink illusrtation was patently Islamophobic. But I found some questions provocative.
Clicking noises dribbling from a LinkNYC kiosks had me asking if someone besides me had found a way to connect the device's loudspeaker to a sound source.
Payphone wisdom seldom goes viral. The confusing substance of this declamation goes a long way to demonstrating why.
Bell Atlantic Yellow Page column for what was left of NYC's payphone business in 2000. One of these payphones service providers still exists. Guess which one..,
Graffiti artist CEEK 333 brought his "I LOVE GREY GOOSE" stylings to this payphone enclosure at Delancey and Forsyth Streets in Manhattan. It's from September, 2012.
PTS's New York City payphones have been known to not work for months on end before coming back alive. This time it feels different, at least with regard to the company's payphones at Grand Central Terminal. I fear the end is nigh for public telephones at the Terminal.
It's enough to make you laugh, but then it's enough to make you go hmmmm.
For years a sign on the RFK/Triborough Bridge has promised that a 24-Hour crisis prevention telephone awaits those who might need it the most. No such phone has ever existed.
Complete with a full QWERTY keyboard and trackball the iSpectrum "payphone of the future" did, in fact, inhabit at least one airport, at Chicago's O'Hare.
I have a fondness for this payphone on account of my picture from 2013, showing a young woman whose profile so closely resembled that of my then-current girlfriend... save for the way she spread her feet.
Not a lot of new features or content have appeared on LinkNYC this year, minus the advertising screens, of course. But I recently discovered that limited access to detailed weather forecasts are available on the tablet, and that a couple of small tweaks appeared in the screensaver.
Australia's 1800 payphones now allow for incoming calls. Combine that with Telstra's Australia Payphone Locator and I came up with a recipe for randomness.