Someone should change these signs at the Trump Tower:

There are no longer pay telephones (plural) at this building. As of July, 2011, there is (as far as I can tell) only one pay telephone at the Trump Tower on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. It is in the basement (the Garden Level) at the end of this long, heavenless hallway:

There used to be 5 payphones down here. I used these phones all the time when I worked across the street, and during my early months in New York during the early 1990s. In those salad days of early adulthood I found the Trump Tower fascinating and glamorous. That is a delusion I no longer maintain.

The absence of the phones on these reflective metal walls opens a garish hall of mirrors where one might see a reflection of his aging self, looking for payphones.

The last payphone at the Trump Tower was in almost continuous use when I stopped by to photograph it. An older gentleman stomped up to the phone. He clearly planned to make some important calls. He clutched an address book, filled with hand-written names and telephone numbers. He practically dove into the enclosed space which houses the payphone, and quickly got down to business:

I loitered around the Garden Level for some time, looking at things, and looking again at the same things in their bronzy reflections. I walked over to the west end of the Garden Level, where Tower Records once had a store. I worked at the Tower Record by Lincoln Center in 1991, and on account of that I knew some people who transferred from there to work at the Trump Tower Tower. I stopped in at the store once in a while, usually expecting to see someone I knew, though after a few years most of the people I knew there had moved on.

I referred to that store as the “Tower Tower.” I remembered joking to an un-amused ex-girlfriend who worked there that she should got a second job as a tow-truck driver so I could call her the “Tower Tower tower.”

In a reflection on the wall I thought I saw the old man going up the elevator. I walked back to the payphone only to find that it was again in use, this time by a couple of confused tourists who didn’t understand how to use the phone. At first I couldn’t understand their problem, as they were muttering their dismay in a language I do not speak.

I later thought they may have been confused at having to deposit 50¢ for this payphone. Most payphones, as they may have read in a tourist guidebook, cost 25¢. Some years ago Verizon attempted to revive its floundering payphone business by offering unlimited local calling time for 50¢. The initiative failed when the company discovered that folks didn’t want to talk that long on public phones, and they announced that they would revert their payphones back to a pricing plan of 25¢ for a few minutes calling time. For whatever reason, though, a number of Verizon payphones are still programmed for the 50¢/unlimited calling time. This last Trump Tower payphone is one such payphone. Is this what had the two tourists do confused? I do not know, but it seems possible.

A few more customers came and went until the payphone was finally available for me to take this picture:

The phone number of the last Trump Tower payphone is (212) 223-8827. That number is found on this page of New York City payphone locations, a page which also includes listings for several other Trump Tower payphones. All these phones appear to be gone today, but I compiled this list of payphones past as a miniature data museum, illustrating how many payphones used to be at a place where only one survives today:

(212) 223-8873, (212) 223-8894, (212) 223-9021, (212) 308-8179, (212) 308-8187, (212) 308-8188, (212) 308-8191, (212) 308-8211, (212) 308-8357, (212) 308-8491, (212) 223-8689, (212) 223-9471, and (212) 599-8584.

The list’s last payphone number (which also appears buried in this enormous page of NYC payphone locations) appears to have been used at one time for a payphone at what is now called The Tennis Club at Grand Central. The penultimate and next-to-last numbers in the list — (212) 223-8689 and (212) 223-9471 — were registered to Pierre Michel Inc. Pierre Michel Salon is now on East 57th Street, but formerly had a presence (and a couple of payphones) at the Trump Tower.

Ephemeral information like this interests me to no end. I feel like I am chasing ghosts, or reaching for pieces of the past which linger in a dimension itself at perpetual risk of evaporation. To me the great value of ephemeral information is its tantalizing capacity to raise forgotten information and businesses establishments from obscurity, helping to confirm the faded memories of local history.

Just this weekend I received a message from a woman asking if I knew anything about Le Berry, a long-gone French restaurant in Manhattan’s theater district. Having researched the place for years she said that had never found any reference to the place until she spotted Le Berry in my collection of matchbook covers. I share my matchbook collection mostly to beef up my collection of Telephone Exchange Name Sightings, but I also shared the decades-old matchbook covers in the hope of raising some long-defunct business establishments from obscurity, if only to prove to someone’s foggy memory that these places really existed. In the case of this long gone French restaurant on 51st Street, this plan seems to have worked. Ephemeral information at its finest, I say.

I believe that the Departments of Commerce for all cities should make available a list of every business that once occupied a location, who owned the business, and other information. It would help answer a lot of questions about local history.

With regard to payphones and the usefulness of the “data museum” of mostly-defunct payphone locations: I am occasionally contacted by district attorneys, independent lawyers, and other researchers seeking evidence that a payphone once existed at a specific place. This small amount of information, I am assured, has proven useful in building prosecutions and defenses, though I am never privy to the actual use to which this information is put.

The list of dead payphone numbers from the Trump Tower will rise again, these phone numbers from the 212 area code being re-assigned to some lucky customers who crave a taste of old school area-code prestige. Area codes mean virtually nothing any more, but if one has a fetish for this pointless fixation then snagging a phone number in the 212 area code would be a nifty badge of honor. If Verizon ever recycles these old payphone numbers for individual customers than I would like to be the first in line to sign up for the wait list, just for the hell of it.

My hunt for any hidden payphones at Trump Tower took me up to the fifth floor of the building. No payphones survive there, or anywhere else in the building except the basement, as far as I could tell. If you decide to visit the fifth floor, though, leave your suicidal tendencies downstairs. I find the straight-down view from up there to be nauseating:

Returning to earth, I spotted three payphones near the building, at the maelstrom of tourist traffic known as the southeast corner of 57th Street and 5th Avenue. The numbers for these phones (also found in various pages of the payphone data museum) are (212) 223-9703, (212) 223-9620, and (212) 308-8150.