According to the “Rules of the City of New York”, Title 67, Chapter 6, Subchapter D, Section 6-42: “Each public pay telephone location, single or multiple, shall have a sign in a form prescribed by the Commissioner, and consistent with the Rules and Regulations promulgated by the New York State Public Service Commission, installed so that it is visible within the enclosures for such telephone.” Among other requirements this required signage should “clearly and legibly identify the owner of the public pay telephone”.

Owners of rogue payphones ignore these requirements, brandishing obviously outdated and misleading placards like this:

This appears to be an illegally installed rogue payphone. Everything about these payphones seems sketchy, from their outdated text matter to the willfully obscured ownership information. The seemingly blood-stained placard, claiming that the long-defunct Bell Atlantic handles local calls, is obviously out of date. Ownership information for the phone is obfuscated by masking tape, making it impossible to determine who is responsible for placing and/or removing the device. The ownership information covered by the masking tape is probably inaccurate anyway, suggesting that the phone itself was stolen.

Determining who is responsible for placement and removal of public telephones is not just an idle curiosity. Improperly installed (or improperly removed) public pay telephones can be dangerous, causing injury and inviting lawsuits.

I do not know what purpose (legitimate or nefarious) a randomly installed rogue public pay telephone might serve in this year of 2013. It can’t be the money, can it? 15 years ago the city earned a fair amount of money from coin-fed public pay telephones, and illegal payphone installations were considered quite the nuisance. With money at stake the city aggressively removed illegal installations to protect the investments of legitimate franchisees. Today the financial landscape is different. Display advertising largely subsidizes the public telephone business in New York, where a typical phone is lucky to collect $30 worth of coins a month. With no display advertising subsidizing phones like this one imagines illicit purposes: a safe phone for drug dealers, perhaps, or maybe the phone is monitored to skim credit card numbers from long-distance callers.

There used to be a phone like this across the street from a jail in Long Island City. Another rogue payphone stood for years outside a shop on 34th Avenue in Astoria. I saw something unusual at that phone: an NYPD police officer using the payphone to make a call. My limited capacity for conspiracy theories got me thinking: maybe law enforcement places these payphones as honeypots for use in police work, the phone line freeloading more-or-less anonymously off a dangling, unused landline. Or maybe that police officer simply lost his cell phone and needed to make a phone call.

The payphone near the jail vanished a few weeks after I spotted it.