A Streetview Tour of Houston’s Many Payphones

Instagram user BENJAUMA posted this image of a payphone customer in Houston, Texas, the city which boasts the 2nd-largest payphone population in the United States.

As we learned last month, statistics from the APCC (American Public Communications Council) reveal that New York by far has the highest number of payphones in the U.S. The APCC reports almost 9,000 payphone locations. Houston is a distant second with about 3,000. Cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco round out the list, leaving us to assume that numerous large cities have extremely few if any public telephones.

Houston might be worth a visit for The Payphone Project, though funds are limited at the moment, and generally speaking I do not choose travel destinations specifically for the purpose of scouting out their payphones. It is something I keep my eyes open for whenever I go out of town. And who even needs to travel any place when there’s StreetView? I am not familiar with the streetscape of Houston but a casual cruise through parts of the Midtown area turned up 4 payphones in no time. Dropping the StreetView guy on random spots in Houston turned up several payphone sightings, as seen below. Does Houston have a genuine need for so many payphones? Or is it just some kind of telephonic accident? Anyone with insight is welcome to contact me.

Really, though, what surprises me is not that a huge city like Houston has thousands of payphones, but that so many other large American cities have virtually none.

A StreetView Tour of Houston Payphones

Three dudes hanging out by a McDonald’s payphone on Gray Street. Are they waiting for someone to call? This payphone is a little blurry but it’s there, on the left, to the right of the leftmost individual.

Five dudes hanging out by the drug store payphone on Cullen Boulevard:

Here is a payphone outside another McDonald’s, also on Gray Street:

Here’s a payphone on Main Street in Houston:

I can’t tell if an actual payphone is contained in this British style phone box outside Leon’s Lounge on McGowen Street, but an actual phone booth is cool to see:

Outside an Exxon station on West Dallas Street:

Here is a perfectly respectable looking gentleman hanging out by the payphone outside a Metro Mart on Beverly Street:

Outside a convenience store on Lockwood Drive:

At a Conoco station on Lockwood Drive:

Outside a Taqueria at Harrisburg Boulevard and Eastwood Street:

Person using a payphone outside a gas station on Milby Street:

This is not a payphone but it’s kinda cool, and it seems like an appropriate way to end this little StreetView tour of Houston’s payphones and its citizens who hang out by them: