This mysteriously shrouded rectangle is all we get to see for now of the first Links, the free WiFi hotspots and multipurpose digital depots expected to replace thousands of NYC's outdoor payphones.
This seasonally tinctured film from IYOBOSA STUDIOS tells the story of "Laura from the Bronx", who answers a ringing payphone to play the fictional game of "The Payphone Millionaire".
Signs throughout the Bronx Zoo promise its visitors public telephones in a number of locations. Lies, all of them. There are no payphones anywhere at the Bronx Zoo, contrary to signs like this one which promises a payphone at section B5, aka the Dancing Crane Plaza. I did not have time to case the entire place. On…
Whenever I hear a subway busker or street musician performing I look for the nearest payphone. If one is nearby, and if it works, I call a number to leave a recording of the sound. It is a very hit-or-miss pursuit with a lot of wasted quarters.
“Hang Up”, the New York City payphone documentary to which I contributed, is now viewable on the public Internet for the first time since its premiere last year. I attended the first public showings of “Hang Up” in NYC theaters. Once I got over the gobsmacked weirdness of seeing my aging face on a gigantic movie screen…
Josef Hoflehner's photo, taken this calendar year, shows a living, breathing, dial-tone-enabled payphone on a snow-caked boardwalk of Lake Erie, Ohio.
Let me be the first to say it: Citybridge's Link devices look pretty flippin' ugly. Thousands of these hulkish, intrusive slabs of advertising, should they actually invade city streets in such quantities as promised, would make today's payphone enclosures look inconspicuous and even charming by comparison.
Data from The Payphone Project connects a rare green-colored 3-slot payphone made by the Automatic Electric Company to a place called the Donut Shack in Lexington, Kentucky.
A charming photo from the NYC nostalgia blog in which a 1980s payphone user partly obscures a sign for the "Queensboro Ave." subway stop, a station and streetname I've never heard of.
Mark Dent at BillyPenn.com penned a nicely done piece on the surprising quantity of payphones actively in service in Philadelphia. I visited Philadelphia some months ago and remember being somewhat surprised at how easy it was to find payphones there. I even spotted a couple of people using payphones. Sightings of people using payphones are…
Pundits and techies pounced on the appearance of a flip phone in the video for Adele’s latest song “Hello”, calling it all kinds of ridiculous. According to director Xavier Dolan, however, it is the grizzled, overgrown British K2 phone box which appears later in the video that has far more significance.
Man using a payphone -- a "CARDPHONE", to be exact -- in Athens, Greece. October, 2015. Photo by French filmmaker Hugo Massa.
Deep within the bowels of the world largest building (the Boeing Everett Factory in Washington) one finds a surprise: An old-style phone booth with a fully functional payphone that accepts incoming calls. Call it at 425-347-9966.
Another phone similar in style to this one (somewhat unusually embedded in a blue wooden box) used to exist nearby in Woodside, at the Carl Sohncke Square. For those interested in such things the Van Wagner company whose name appears on this payphone no longer exists. Van Wagner was acquired by CBS Outdoor Media a…
This old payphone up for grabs on eBay has a secret that only the Payphone Project’s archive of former payphone numbers and locations could reveal. This old rotary dial payphone was once used on Liberty Island, at the Statue of Liberty, in New York Harbor.
"Hang Up" Ugo Massa'a payphone documentary to which I contributed last year, is playing at 3pm every Sunday in October at the Brooklyn Historical Society, at 128 Pierrepont Street. The film is short, and while my presence in the film might influence my opinions I think it is fair to say that the film beautifully and with surprising elegance crafted the story behind a subject matter most would consider coarse.
If you see something, know something, or want the NBC I-Team’s squad of gotcha journalists to publicly shame someone who did you wrong, give 1-866-NEWS-244 a call from your nearest payphone. The call is toll free and will not cost you a nickel. More importantly: No one needs to know who you are.
Acting on impulse one day late last summer, young Alfred Higley Jr. proved that honesty still lives. The 12-year-old, who lives on Bell Lane, West Shokan, had spent the day at the town pool, located a mile from his home. Ready to return home for dinner, he decided to call his mother to ask if she could pick him up in the family car.
A decrepit old payphone stands miserably outside the Crown Motor Inn, an hourly rates motel on Queens Boulevard in Woodside, Queens. Considering its clientele this payphone must have seen lots of use back in the day as cheating husbands and wives sought to disguise their true location by calling home from behind the anonymizing shield of an unlisted payphone.
Yesterday’s “European Payphone Chase” featured photos from film director Ugo Massa and others who have discovered that payphones are hiding in plain sight all around them. Today’s image is from Mr. Massa’s father, Maxime Massa, who recently traveled to Jakarta where he captured this photo of a Telkom Indonesia payphone. This phone is, of course, stuffed with bicycle helmets.
The phone number shown on this Automatic Electric unit does not appear in the Payphone Project’s archive of Wisconsin payphone locations past and present. A number fairly close to it (608-782-9055) shows that a payphone once existed at Hunter’s Last Chance, a bar at 150 South Leonard Street in West Salem, Wisconsin.
Anyone who knows me much at all finds themselves afflicted by a strange condition in which they start seeing payphones everywhere. Ugo Massa is no exception. He and his circles of influence now find themselves seeing payphones everywhere, hiding in corners at train stations and airports, at shopping malls and theaters. The unicorn-like sightings are regularly reported to me in a spirit of discovering something hiding in plain sight.
From the midst of Mitchell Kanashkevich’s stupendous photo essay Mauritania, the Most Amazing Place You’ll Probably Never Visit rises an image of what must surely be among the world’s most primitive phone booths still in operation.
The 716 area code printed on the placard indicates this phone was used somewhere in western New York. The phone number shown on the payphone – (716) 394-9577 – is not found on the Payphone Project’s archive of past payphone locations, but numbers very close to it are listed in the city of Canandaigua. The closest number to this one is (716) 394-9594 at Pudgie’s Pizza on Main Street. Perhaps this payphone was once used at a place near there in Canandaigua.
Phones like this stay in place for years, not even attracting the interest of thieves. An abandoned Verizon payphone (should a thief possess skills to restore one to working order) could get a couple hundred bucks on eBay. You might even find a few bucks worth of quarters inside these payphones. With no indication that these phones are out of service nothing would stop an unwitting citizen from depositing coins and dialing a number before discovering that the phone has no dial tone.
Philadelphia, a city of two million, has a fair share of payphones on its city streets, at least in the Center City area I visited a few weeks ago. In this photo essay I share 43 up close photos from Philadelphia’s Center City payphones, which range in condition from fully functional to utterly abused and abandoned.