CityBridge, the consortium of advertising and technology companies behind the LinkNYC rollout, remains actively involved in day to day maintenance of most of New York City’s remaining outdoor payphones. These same phones are expected to be replaced and supplemented by thousands upon thousands of  LinkNYC monoliths.

Not yet for this old payphone. It was curious to note a standalone clamshell payphone that had recently been updated with signage (beaten up signage at that) advertising a defunct advertising project called StreetMessages.com.

StreetMessages was a division of Van Wagner, the display advertising company that got into kiosk ads after acquiring a portion of Verizon’s payphone assets in mid-2012. StreetMessage’s charter was to monetize clamshell payphones with wraparound advertising that reached pedestrians right at eye level. Premier Media Group has been another player in this realm.

This phone itself, formerly owned by East Harlem Unity Communications, was essentially confiscated by CityBridge when the consortium was granted a monopoly franchise for its LinkNYC program. The phone was never owned by Van Wagner or StreetMessages. This is why I thought it a little odd to see the StreetMessages logo placed on this phone now, in 2017,  when the company has been gone for a good amount of time.

Van Wagner changed its focus, moving entirely away from payphone kiosks. Apparently they didn’t think enough of the StreetMessages.com domain name to hold on to it, or to more properly dispose of it by passing it on to a more relevant firm.

But then maybe it is just as well that they let it go. The term “street messages” seems to be associated not so much with payphone kiosks and legitimate street level advertising but instead with graffiti and vandalism, the bane of any payphone owner.

Today the StreetMessages.com web site contains only a GoDaddy parked domain splash page. The domain was grabbed by a speculator whose stable of domain names and web sites lead to massage parlors and Asian escort sites. It could be interesting if that domain speculator chooses to set up a valid web site and thus take advantage of what essentially amounts to free advertising offered by StreetMessages.com’s placement on hundreds of payphones throughout New York.

I took a little walk up to the former location of StreetMessages headquarters, to see what trace of the company remained from its last known address at 18-65 42nd Street in Astoria. Expecting nothing I instead found that they had actually left one of their payphones outside the building. Perhaps this was set up in the spirit of a marquee guidepost of sorts for finding the company back in the day. Today it lurks more like a tombstone for the memory of StreeetMessages.

Installed sometime between February and July of 2013 (according to StreetView images) the phone lingers, huddled next to a UPS collection bin and likely drawing the attention of absolutely nobody in this industrial stretch of northern Astoria, Queens. It looks like the Van Wagner and StreetMessages guys just closed up shop and skedaddled, leaving this abandoned payphone on city property.

There is actually room for two phones on this Janusian pair of pedestals, but the other enclosure has been covered over, providing a fresh surface for unimpeded vandalism, as seen here.

ConEdison certainly got its money’s worth out of whatever they paid for this ad placement, which looks like it could be here for a very long time, if not in perpetuity.

Its information placard identifies the defunct Van Wagner as the owner of this phone. There is no dial tone but the phone is topped with two solar panels that could, one assumes, keep this phone’s battery charged. It may be that this phone is also equipped not with a traditional landline but a wireless uplink, and that this device is fully free-standing.

(718) 520-9841 was formerly assigned to a payphone at Queens Boulevard and 76th Road, according to Payphone Project’s archive of New York City payphone locations. If this phone is in fact the exact same unit that used to be at that Queens Boulevard location then I can say with certainty that I used it on at least one occasion several years ago, though details of the call(s) are lost on me now.

No such joy in making use of this payphone on this day, though it was good for a laugh to find this lingering obscurity.