Grand Central Terminal, the passages specifically, is the focus of this survey. But I encounter a few other midtown payphones on my way over to Grand Central from the far west side, including a couple of ghostly-looking phones facing impending doom at the storied, soon-to-be-demolished Hotel Pennsylvania.
0:01 – 41st Street & 11th Avenue. Interesting spot for a payphone. Number shown: 212-952-9078, is listed on this page, but at a Bowling Green location.
1:29 – So much noise over here.
2:14 – An abandoned PTS phone I always forget about, at Penn Station’s uptown A/C/E platform. 212-502-4461 is correctly listed on this page.
3:08 – The Hotel Pennsylvania will be demolished, taking its dozen or so abandoned PTS payphones with it. Let’s get one last look at a couple of them. I spy two payphones through the Hotel Pennsylvania’s 32nd Street revolving door entrance, now closed. Another hallway on the other side of the hotel, not visible from outside, has 6 or 7 abandoned, non-working PTS phones, as well as some craggy looking old public fax terminals.
These phones and others on upper levels of the hotel were popular among phone phreaks who attended the HOPE conferences at the Hotel Pennsylvania.
4:34 – CityBridge phones at Lexington and 31st.
5:59 – At Grand Central Terminal to see if the passages are open. Starts with some metal plates where payphones used to be near the 7 train escalators and elevator, at the 42nd Street entrance. For this and the next few clips I insert photos of mine from when at least a few payphones still stood on these walls. The photo that appears in this first clip shows 3 phones where 6 used to be.
6:58 – The map of Grand Central Terminal still shows telephone icons where the payphones used to be in the passages. Those phones are long gone, making me question how freakin’ old that map is.
7:34 – On to the passages, for what turned into a little adventure traveling through these tunnels for the first time since pre-pandemic. A few dead phones turned up.
10:17 – 212-599-8631, the 30-second phone, where for 25¢ you could call anywhere in New York state outside the five boroughs for 30 seconds, is listed on this page but at a different location. The 30-second payphone was quite a hit.
10:32 – There are what I believe to be working phones in the passages. I didn’t lift them because doing so might automatically ring a security or police telephone somewhere in the Terminal.
15:28 – Found an old TTY with the metal frames intended to prevent shoulder-surfing. The big wall of white lights is also pretty cool.
18:27 – 212-599-8710 is listed on this page but not quite correctly. Evidently this phone used to be upstairs before being moved downstairs.
20:06 – 212-599-8694, a phone I used for a lot of Payphone Radio calls, is listed on this page but at a different location. This tour ends near the Grand Central Terminal Lost and Found, with a shot of a bunch of metal plates where 14 phones in a row once hung on the wall.