Abandoned Payphone Across From Port Authority Bus Terminal

I’ve photographed these abandoned payphone enclosures and their one remaining payphones many times over the years. I estimate the two phones that used to be here were last in service around 2009 or 2010. I’m surprised even a little bit of the one payphone handset has survived that long.

Spackled with graffiti stickers and paint I find vandals (or their minions) represented on these phones include SKULL N’ TONES, the RATANIC ARMY, NEKO, DIVINITY ROXX, and others.

About the phones themselves, to some it would appear to be no longer possible to say with certainty who owned them, or rather who left them here to molder away. But based on similarities between the one surviving phone I think I can say with certainty these phones were abandoned by S.A.C. Vending, a payphone and vending machine company based in Ozone Park, Queens. S.A.C. is now either defunct or focused on other lines of business. It is also possible the phones were owned by Comet Communications.

If you compare this phone to this payphone I spotted in 1998 I don’t think you can deny the resemblance. The round AMERICAN LOCK on the right semi-surrounded by a steel frame that juts out from a seemingly impenetrable wall of steel is obviously an identical part. The absence of “OPER” on the 0 keys make this abandoned phone a clear product of S.A.C. Vending.

Two payphones once inhabited these Janusian payphone enclosures. I once used the phone no longer present. I remember stepping over some garbage to get to it. I probably used it to call in a voicemail message to my payphone podcast, a project I’ve been working on for years and polishing off the last few weeks.

Any communication attempt, be it business, artistic, situational, even emergency; is imperiled from the start if it relies in any way on a functional and reliable public telephone network. This statement holds true today more than ever. LinkNYC kiosks are replacing payphones in New York and, when it comes to making phone calls they have, in my usage, proven so far to be about equally if not less reliable than the traditional payphones they are claimed to improve upon. The kiosks’ advertising panels deliver as one might expect, albeit with frightfully few ads to support the tsunamic rollout of LinkNYC kiosks. These kiosks are being erected at a pace so ambitious that I imagine a time in the not so distant future when everyone behind them gives up and they are left to rot, like these payphone enclosures.