“Call from any NYC pay phone to hear what was happening on that block in 1993.”

Such is the promise of Recalling 1993, a payphone-based feature of the New Museum’s “NYC 1993: EXPERIMENTAL JET SET, TRASH AND NO STAR” on view at 235 Bowery through May 26. “Recalling 1993” was conceived by the Droga5 ad agency.

Any endeavor which depends on public telephones is imperiled from the start. I use payphones more than most people in this year of 2013 and I can say with confidence that the nuances of failure inhabiting these devices make them an unstable platform for creative work.

Thus it was with a sense of sympathetic skepticism that I approached “Recalling 1993”, an ambitious project promising neighborhood-specific audio programs accessible only from Manhattan payphones. Calls to 1-855-FOR-1993 from Skype, a cell phone, or from payphones in Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Staten Island would return a recorded message saying that access to the programs is limited to Manhattan payphones.

My first reaction upon hearing about this was project, simply, is this going to work? I imagined this payphone-based project might work here or there, a sense of optimistic resignation reflecting what I think when picking up any public telephone: I wonder if this is going to work!

Geographically-specific payphone-only access to audio programming is a barrier to entry like no other, but I appreciate the aural æsthetics of connecting to 1993 through a medium commonly used at that time. I maintain a love for the rugged, monochrome sound of the landline and its tangible connection to a physical spot. In short I was a fan of “Recalling 1993” without even accessing it — an attitude apparently shared by others.

Arriving on Manhattan island I encountered barrier to entry #2: finding a working payphone.

The first payphone I spotted was this bedraggled beauty, its handset disconnected from the phone, rendering it not functional. The useless slab haunts the 5th Avenue N/W/R subway stop, one of numerous MTA subway stations with zero working payphones.

Needless to say, with its handset disconnected it would not be possible to Recall 1993 or anything else from this location.

Upstairs I spotted a TDD/TTY payphone. That device did not work, either. Thanks, Verizon, for abandoning the deaf!

The first dozen payphones I spotted outside sported “NO DIAL TONE” stickers, signalling not to bother trying to call from these phones.

Anyone trying to find working payphones these days will have similar experiences. Many payphones do not work, others that have dial tones often work poorly, many phones refuse to accept coins — the list of functional incontinence characterizing public phones goes on.

Nevertheless this intrepid payphonista was determined to get through to “Recalling 1993” in the spirit with which it was created — by calling from Manhattan payphones.

After passing about a dozen bum phones I found a dial tone on Madison Avenue below 57th Street. Dialing 1-855-FOR-1993 connected me to Chazz Palminteri talking about his big break. No offense, Chazz, but I did not listen through to the end. I expected hyperlocal (or at least neighborhood-specific) storytelling but got no sense of that from Palminteri’s presentation.

I quickly learned that herein lay the rub for this project. The promise that you can “Call from any NYC pay phone to hear what was happening on that block in 1993” is not exactly true. There are only a select number of phones offering content local to the area. None of the abundant press coverage of this project seemed to make note of that. A second look at Recalling1993.com reveals that by somewhat obtusely scrolling within an iframe you will see a legend indicating which payphone locations were chosen for hyperlocal storytelling.

The first calls I made were in midtown and Times Square. Only one call, from 7th Avenue near 44th Street in Times Square, seemed to offer a location-specific set of programs on the Disneyfication of Times Square. At the end of the first program a voice instructed me to press 1, 2, 3, or 4 to hear another story about the Times Square area. I pressed 2 and heard a recording that was clearly borked. It played back at about 1/50th its recorded speed, sounding like a 33-1/3 RPM record turning at 3-1/3 RPM.

The recorded programs themselves had occasional glitches like this but as I ruefully expected the real barriers to entry for “Recalling 1993” are intrusive technical failings of the payphones themselves.

1-855-FOR-1993 is a toll-free number, meaning no coins should be needed for the call to go through. Nevertheless, dialing the number from a payphone on 47th Street in the Diamond District returned a recorded message telling me to “Please deposit one dollar for the next 4 minutes.” In a spirit of payphonistic sympathy I deposited 4 of my hard-earned quarters into that phone, just to see if would connect to “Recalling 1993”. It did not. My quarters were graciously returned, exploding in a small cacophony of noise as the payphone’s innards blithely belched my shekels into the coin return slot. (What a great sound.)

Similar incidents included a payphone at Madison Avenue and 60th Street that wanted $1 to complete the call. Another phone at Park Avenue and 61st Street wanted 75¢ to complete the toll-free call.

Calling from a payphone at Madison Avenue and 50th Street revealed the strangest glitch: Dialing 1-855-FOR-1993 transferred me to an automated collect call attendant, a weird soundscape I don’t think I have heard since the Reagan administration. If you’ve never heard an automated collect call attendant it sounds like this: A robot voice asks for your name and attempts to record you as you say it. The robot connects the call to the number you dialed and announces to whoever answers that “You have a collect call from (insert your voice stating your name). The robot then asks the person you called if they will accept charges for the call. Acceptance is signaled when the person you are calling presses a button or clearly says “YES”.

These phones were obviously not programmed to recognize 855 as a toll-free exchange. 855 is a relatively new to the toll-free realm, premiering in October, 2011. Between its newness and the fact that many toll-free numbers reject calls from payphones it would not surprise me if some payphone owners never bothered programming their phones to recognize 855 as a valid exchange. Similar delays in programming payphones to recognize 877 and 888 occurred when those toll-free exchanges were introduced in the 1990s. My transcript and photo of the “FINE PRINT” from a Titan payphone shows that 855 is not even listed as a valid toll-free exchange. Telebeam lists neither 855 nor 866. To its credit East Harlem Payphones (in my opinion the best independent payphone service provider in New York) indicates that 855 is valid from its payphones.

My first attempts at calling “Recalling 1993” from a cell phone or Skype returned a message telling me to “get off the landline” and access this content from payphones located in Manhattan. Alas, I frequently got the same message when I really was calling from a Manhattan payphone. From a Coastal Communications phone at 7th Avenue and 45th Street in Times Square I heard the recorded message telling me to call from a New York City payphone, even though I certainly was calling from just such a payphone.

I also might not understand something about the terminology (or maybe I am missing an inside joke) but being advised to “get off the landline” and get to a payphone does not quite parse. Payphones are among the last bastions of the landline.

At Madison Avenue and 62nd Street the call sounded like it went through but no recording was played. Madison Avenue and 57th Street: Same thing. The call went through, as verified by the sound of an automated “Thank you” message, but after about a minute of silence I hung up, dadaistically imagining that this Cageian program of silence was intentional.

In spite of these and other glitches I was, all told, able to access about a dozen programs, some of them repeatedly. Some content was informative, some of it was meh, some of it comprised histories I sorta-kinda remembered from skimming newspaper headlines. But very little of it seemed particularly local to the areas from which I called. Upper East Side payphones linked to stories about the meatpacking district while Midtown phones carried accounts of the World Trade Center bombing. The aforementioned Times Square Disneyfication program seemed to hit the geo-mark but other calls from around there returned stories with no particular connection to the area.

Without listening to every program I will assume that none of the programs include actual sounds from 1993. Clips of radio or television news reportage of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing would bring the stories back to life, and fulfill the project’s description as a “time capsule”.

I also assume that none of the programs actually reference payphones. That is unfortunate if true. The “Apology Line” — a telephone confessional which encouraged criminals to anonymously describe their misdeeds from payphones — was going strong in 1993. A description of (or audio excerpts from) Apology would open an interesting window into the anonymous world of payphone users and real-life recordings of them describing New York’s seedier past.

Anecdotes of payphones being retro-fitted with rotary dial devices and blocked from receiving incoming calls to thwart drug dealers would also connect callers to the payphone as it was perceived in 1993, a time during which payphones enjoyed their last gasp of mainstream relevance. This relevance was a result of the pager craze. Important, valued people from all walks of life carried pagers in plastic holsters on their belt, disappearing into phone booths to reach people at callback numbers appearing on the devices.

My sympathies for the project might be stronger if the subject matter interested me. Night clubs, mobsters, and real estate were nowhere in my bailiwick in 1993, but other things were. I would be inspired had the project solicited Joe or Jane Q. Public to call from local payphones, telling their hyper-local story of what mattered to them at or near the spot 20 years ago. Oh, the stories I have told in this manner…

Press coverage of the project has been positive, though it is hard to find accounts from anyone who accessed it. An Associated Press piece was blasted out to publications worldwide, and countless web sites and bloggers relayed descriptions of “Recalling 1993” without actually attempting to experience it.

As the project has continued I may be the only observer to have noticed that “Recalling 1993” does not work any more. Since last week every call I’ve made to 1-855-FOR-1993 got cut off after 15-20 seconds. Additionally, the Manhattan-only feature no longer works. I can access the number from payphones in Queens, though the calls get cut off just the same.

Toll-free calls are, of course, not really free. Calls from payphones to 800/855/866/877/888 numbers include dialaround compensation of about 50¢ to the payphone owner, as well as other fees which are presumably being charged to the creators of “Recalling 1993.” These charges must be adding up pretty quickly, and they are going to waste now that complete programs cannot be heard.

If I had a specific attraction to “Recalling 1993” it is not just because I have a particular interest in payphones. I’ve been doing a similar project on my own for a couple of years now, accumulating audio recordings of myself calling a voicemail box and describing memories of experiences I had at or near the payphone. Some day I will assemble the raw content into meaningful form but for now I share it on a mostly-private web site. I don’t expect any museums to take an interest (I am no Chazz Palminteri, after all) but in the spirit of “Recalling 1993” I called in a couple of memories I had of 1993. Here is one of them, an unscripted description of my first web page, the early WWW, and of my involvement with the Apology Line: