Phone Books for Phantom Phone Booths

One of the weird vagaries lingering among NYC’s numerous abandoned phone booth locations is the fact that telephone directories still get delivered to them.

Phone booths, as virtually any American of a certain age will recall, were often supplemented with telephone directories used for looking up business and/or residential phone numbers without having to dial the Operator. The infrastructure for delivering these phone books still exists, but deliveries today are made to locations where no public telephone has been present for many years and where virtually no one could be expected to actually use the books.

This photo from last summer (2012) shows a stack of 4 freshly-delivered phone books inside an abandoned NYC phone booth. Phone books still get delivered to this booth years after the payphone itself was removed.

The phone itself (removed in early 2008) was an old-style rotary phone allegedly used by bookies who preferred conducting their business using non-touchtone public telephones. Today the old booth is mostly used as a storage closet. It also serves as a cell phone booth and as a makeout chamber.

This is possibly the most pristine old booth I’ve seen in a publicly accessible place in NYC. Too bad Verizon took away the phone.

This photo (from April, 1999) shows what was once typical for phone booths: a set of 7 telephone directories suspended between two wood phone booths at the main branch of the New York Public Library. Those phone books are gone today, though the old wood phone booths remain.

Telephone directories today also arrive at check-cashing places, libraries, and other phantom locations where payphones used to be. These useless phone books also appear at places of business that closed shop long ago, and at private residences that have been abandoned for years. Few human beings use the books, which are usually not even removed from the plastic bags in which they arrive. Today’s phone books make periodic migrations from printing press to homes and places of business before heading directly to recycling or trash.