There was something fishy about this abandoned, unusually derelict payphone enclosure, owned by CityBridge. With payphone enclosures like this required to be gone by the end of 2021 it may not be much longer we get to enjoy this bit of accidental art, where the forces of entropy and accumulation seem to coexist. Gotta love that fish dangling from a wire. Who did this?
I thought all the outdoor payphones around Times Square were long gone. I missed these non-working CityBridge masterpieces, at 7th Avenue and 50th Street. And also: What really keeps the payphone business alive today?
Someone had their graffiti A-game on placing images of the Fisher-Price Chatter Phone on this derelict CityBridge payphone enclosure. Found on Third Avenue, where the LinkNYC stampede began, it seems that going forward old payphones and enclosures like this will be replaced with redesigned "Link5G" kiosks, æsthetic monstrosities rising 32 feet into the air.
Spotted this new-to-me old Telephone EXchange Name number today: LO-8-6700. In NYC “LO” stood for “LOngacre,” and I thought that might be true for Englewood as well. But according to the Telephone EXchange Name Project in Englewood “LO” stood for “LOwell.” I found a few references to “Charles Brucker and Sons” and “Charles Brucker” at…
A woman wearing a red scarf on a warm day made this seem like something more than just another photo of someone using a payphone. Did she know I was taking her picture?
One of the more widely-heralded features of LinkNYC was its touted ability to help “bridge the digital divide”. This would be accomplished by providing not only superfast free WiFi internet access but also access to social services for those who might otherwise be unable to use or maintain control of a computer or mobile communications…
Rutherford did not look too promising at first but once I found the right section old dead payphones started turning up. Most interesting find here was an old ETS phone, a relic of one of the biggest scams to ever hit the payphone industry.
This has little to do with KEST GAK, actually, but their vandalizing of a LinkNYC was, I believe, tastefully executed. It got me writing again about LinkNYC, the bane of payphone users in New York and a program which, for now at least, appears to be in peril.
A look back at the payphones of Coney Island's past, with a link to my video documenting the last payphones of Coney Island and Brighton Beach.
Just a little window into what should be the unseen innards of a CityBridge payphone enclosure. It appears this clear acrylic sheet was used to protect display advertising panels from corrosive effects of ultraviolet light.
This working payphone stands outside the Darien Telephone Company building in Darien, Georgia. Shot on film last month this enclosure has a dome-covered light fixture resembling the prop payphone used in “Little Miss Sunshine.” No word on whether the light worked on this old enclosure in Darien. Photos are by Daniel Hopsicker, a regular contributor…
The Union Square Jobs Center, at 109 East 16th Street, finally reopened, making one more working public pay telephone available, albeit only during the Job Center's office hours. I though certain this phone had been disconnected. Happy to be wrong.
I've been hunting down what's left of the payphones in the five boroughs of New York, as well as some New Jersey cities. This week sent me to Orange, NJ, where I likely would have found more than these specimens had I headed east instead of west. I'll be back.
Since the day LinkNYC landed on our streets we have been told, time and again, that the surveillance capabilities of the kiosks' cameras, in particular the front-facing camera that hovers over the tablet screen, are disabled. Guess what? That's not true. Another Smart City lie.
This one might be gone already. Somewhere in Gowanus, a decrepit, derelict, useless hulk of a payphone past.
Spotted this on Labor Day, 2001, near the old Twin Towers. Never saw a payphone truck again in the wilds.
They took away your payphones and gave you this instead. Until yesterday my expectation when making phone calls from LinkNYC was that only about ½ the calls would work. I did not expect the failure rate of the kiosks' free phone call feature to have reached 100%.
This photo of Gerry Winogrand, using a Midtown Manhattan phone booth in 1967, reminds me that while I have no real nostalgia for phone booths I do miss the calming, thought-slowing act of dialing a number on a rotary dial telephone.
When last I passed through Elizabeth I remember being surprised not just by the quantity but by the fact that most of the payphones there worked. The latter is not true today but I did find one working public telephone in Elizabeth, along with a couple of unusually beefy Calstar phones.
I can think of no Warholian flourish or bit of wit to embellish the fact that there just happens to be a payphone at the Andy Warhol museum that takes incoming calls. Museum visitors might find something Warholian, or at least artistically abstract, about making random contact with strangers in this way, should they answer your call. Give it a try. Call Andy at 412-231-8878.
UPDATED 5-11-2022: A few nits to pick. Only one working phone remains at Penn Station, and I fully verified that as of this week none of the phones in CityBridge’s West End Avenue phone booths actually work, not even for 911. This question gets bandied about once in awhile, often on Reddit, where the gods…
I traveled down the 4 train line from Woodlawn to Fordham Road, capturing sightings of all the dead PTS payphones along the way. None of them worked and none of them ever will. I also spotted a couple of non-PTS phones outside the subways.
Can't not love the phone number hand-written onto the payphone at the Soccer Tavern in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. How does DRINK BEER show up on Caller ID?
Has anyone even touched the payphone at Crabtree Falls State Park since Daniel Hopsicker took these photos over a month ago? Calls to 540-377-9941 continue to return a busy signal suggesting the phone remains, as seen in these photos, off the hook. Don't disturb the wildlife.
I picked up three boxes of 35mm slides labeled "NYC Street Scenes 1980s" at a thrift shop. For only five bucks I felt like a thief. Among the 150 or so slides I scanned I found this photo capturing three payphones at Grand Central Terminal, along with choice shots of the Twin Towers, Old Calvary Cemetery, Times Square, and other places in New York.
A driving tour of Staten Island's abandoned payphone carcasses turned up way more specimens than expected. My favorite was the lo-rise phone at Net Cost Market on Amboy Street.
I had never been to Clifton or Passaic but I had a hunch there'd be a good quantity of old Newtel payphones on Main Avenue. I was right. Unfortunately not a single one of them worked, despite signage affixed to every single one saying "YES THIS PAYPHONE WORKS". Felt good getting out of the city, though, so it was a good day trip.
Just a few selections from my ongoing collection of New York City payphone videos. I found one dead and done phone in the Bronx, a few at Macy's, a working phone in Flushing, and I checked on the Penn Station phones, which sources say will be "downsized" soon.