I uncovered this old photo through a kind of random channel. It is from 9 years ago but for some reason Google’s news alerts flagged it as newly posted. That payphone is long gone, as is the one that used to be next to it.
I remember thinking the woman wearing a red scarf on a warm day was unusual enough to make this more than just any old picture of someone using a payphone. Did she know I was taking her picture?
For years I collected as many photos as possible of people using payphones, documenting the fact that people still use them. In present times, with so few public phones remaining, the unfortunate march of “progress” has created a reality where people would still use them if only they could.
LinkNYC has proven to be an inferior replacement for payphones of yore, not only in terms of reliability but also call quality and general user experience. Half the calls I’ve attempted do not work, many devices are out of order for months at a time, one must scream for the person they called to be able to hear them, etc. The list of gripes, grievances, and grandiosities goes on.
LinkNYC does have two advantages over the old payphones: Phone calls to any number in the U.S. (except for traffic pumping and ice cream truck music numbers) are free, and access to 411 directory assistance is free. The old payphones charged 75¢ to connect to 411.
Payphones certainly could and I think should have competed on being free to use. Payphone should have been made freephones long ago, as I exhorted in 2012, capturing the attention of absolutely nobody. The costs associated with maintaining public telephones far exceeds coin or calling card revenue. Payphones of New York should have been allowed to survive on revenue from display advertising, or else subsidized by concession fees paid by the City.
But talk of competition in the New York City payphone world is moot. CityBridge, which owns the LinkNYC totems, also won a monopoly franchise on all the payphones it has replaced. Independent payphone service provider such as PTS or NewTel would have no luck getting payphones back into the hands of the niche demographic that would prefer to use them.
They are out there, those payphone users of 2021. Virtually every time I pass through Penn Station, America’s busiest transit hub, I see someone using one of the phones there. At present only three phones are functional. It will be unfortunate for those last users when, inevitably, their phones get pulled once and for all, forcing them to purchase cell phones and services costing far more than they spend on payphone calls.
Most recently at Penn Station I spotted this individual who, hanging up the phone in frustration, seemed to have discovered before I did that this phone no longer works. I only found this to be the case yesterday. Follow The Payphone Project on Twitter, btw.
Virtually every single time I pass through PennStation someone is using one of the payphones. Among the last working public phones in Midtown. pic.twitter.com/jibbcrVxjo
— Payphone Project (@projectpayphone) September 27, 2021
Most of my photos of people using payphones made it into this photo series, which I do not expect to update going forward. The header images on this website are taken from that series. if you load and reload any page on this site you’ll see a photo at the top of the page showing someone using a payphone. Each one is chosen at random from over 250 photos.
Do people still use payphones? They would if they could.