Payphone Gone

Many a time these days an individual in search of a payphone is fooled by the meaningless beacon of the “Phone” sign. Signs like this used to mean that one could expect to find a public phone nearby. Today, useless signs like this typically mean nothing except that a payphone was present here, sometimes many years ago. For some reason the removal of public phones is not always followed by removal of the accompanying signage. I have spotted some pretty old bits of phantom payphone signage, such as this Bell Atlantic sign, hovering meaninglessly over an empty square of sidewalk space once occupied by a payphone. The Bell Atlantic brand disappeared many years ago, but its name still lingers in ghost signage and on some older payphones. I also see occasional relics of the Bell South and AT&T brands, though both those companies exited the payphone business. None of my sightings of old payphone signage are as old, though as the pock-marked New York Telephone Company/American Telegraph & Telegraph Co. Bell System sign I saw in Queens last year. There is no telephone or telegraph anywhere near this old sign.