This unfortunate payphone on Broadway near 49th Street in Astoria took a beating. Something hit it hard, leaving a dangerous blast of shattered glass and twisted metal. The whole sorry mess was tied up with some rope, presumably to keep it from collapsing altogether.
The telephone’s handset lies helpless on the ground, resting on top of the real casualty of this incident: the advertising panels. There is no money in payphones any more but those advertising panels make boat loads of coin for both the City and Citybridge, the consortium of tech and advertising companies that was granted a monopoly franchise on virtually all New York’s outdoor payphones.
I got these pictures on Sunday, June 19. By the next day this demolished phone had been hauled away, probably never to be replaced. This happens to be an area with a decent quantity of payphones, so it’s no real loss to anyone who relied on this phone. This also happens to be an area where I frequently see people using pay telephones.
I had intended to get more and better shots of this little disaster with a DSLR but I could not return to the scene until the next day. By that time everything was gone. This efficiency of cleanup actually highlights one of the realities of payphones today that seems to surprise a lot of people: These things are actually actively maintained and serviced by private, for-profit companies. I’ve been surprised at how many people I talk to who assume payphones are owned by Verizon, or by New York City. Verizon exited the payphone business long ago, and while the city collects a decent amount of money from payphones’ advertising revenues it is not in any way responsible for the maintenance or upkeep of these things. Most of New York’s outdoor payphones are the responsibility of Citybridge, which is charged with keeping old-fashioned payphones operational even as they roll out LinkNYC, the co-called “payphone of the future” which will replace thousands of today’s public pay telephones.
Payphone Down: Broadway in Astoria
It is not uncommon to spot the occasional desecrated payphone around town. Sometimes vandals are responsible, other times a fallen payphone is little more than a consequence of random stuff that happens on the mean, mean streets. I typically get photos of the more dramatically disemboweled payphones I see, but finding those pictures now among the ocean of photos that have accumulated in my hard drives is a matter of happenstance and not intent. I spotted this photo of a Titan-branded payphone enclosure with its advertising gizzards showing:
