This Telebeam payphone in Astoria has been “TEMPORARILY OUT OF SERVICE” for several years.

The payphone enclosure is wrapped in display advertising panels. Those display advertising panels are replaced frequently, but the phone inside languishes.

This phone used to accept incoming calls. As any payphonista knows it has been unusual for many years to find a payphone that receives calls. This phone had a slight, synthetic, almost inaudible ringtone. Through this phone I conducted one of my last media interviews on the subject of public telephones and their former place in American culture.

I believe this phone has been out of service for at least 3 years.

Using the city’s Online 311 Pay Phone Complaint Form I submitted a note about this payphone, expressing my annoyance at public phones allowed to linger useless for so many years when revenue from display advertising appeared to provide funds to support the telephone.

Unlike some street furniture activists I take no offense in the use of display advertising when its revenue subsidizes the functional existence of public telephones. But it is cynical to plaster a non-working device with advertising with the assumption that no one will notice or care that the phone does not work.

I have had poor luck with the 311 payphone complaint form. Payphones about which I “complain” are never fixed. They are simply removed. Those phones about which I complained had been useless for years. With no visible means of subsidy (i.e.: advertising) affixed to them — and with little hope of coin or calling card revenue making them profitable — it was more financially prudent to retire them, public interest bedamned.

With money at stake is it possible that this complaint will lead to a different outcome? Will a dial tone rise again from this useless device?