The phone survives, along with maybe a dozen or so other dead phones throughout Central Park, but its dial tone finally left us sometime between March of last year and last week. I know that’s a broad time span but that’s how long it had been since I had reason to check in at the Central Park Model Boat Sailing place, where this phone still hangs on a wall near the women’s restroom.
I had a memorable encounter the last time I visited this spot. As I picked up the payphone handset a woman nearby offered me use of her cell phone, a gesture I interpreted as some kind of pity offering meant to save me the indignity of using a public pay telephone. I laughed and refused her offer.
This is one of those phones where a yellow card invites you to make “FREE CALLS”. *10 connects you to a prayer line, with some phones connecting to a pre-recorded message and others going to an actual live person. I’m not religious but I do find the calls to be enchanting. I don’t think all of the other *## connect to what they say they do on this card, and some don’t work at all. These shortcuts all connect to toll-free numbers. PTS, the company that owns this phone, wants you to call these numbers because they earn PTS about 50¢ for every toll-free call made from their payphones.
This phone might not be permanently dead. Calling its number — 212-650-9321 — does not yet return the “beep beep beep not in service” message, suggesting that only the phone’s hardware is out of kilter. It remains possible someone will bring this phone back to life. But the trend these days, now more than ever, especially with phones owned by PTS, has been to just let these things go.
A few years ago I did a survey of payphones in Central Park, finding about a dozen hanging on at various locations. Only this one worked. In that survey I also unexpectedly encountered a cool row of four phone booths in the locker room at what was then the Trump Skating Rink. I would not know if those booths still exist.
This phone actually shows two numbers, one on top of the other. The top number — 212-650-9321 — seems to be the one assigned to this phone. The bottom number returns one of the funniest intercept messages I’ve heard in a long time. The dude sounds sad, doesn’t he?
Inside the payphone’s enclosure is a sign from long ago, a message from New York Telephone offering up to $2,000 for “information leading to arrest and conviction of persons damaging or robbing public telephone.” A toll-free number on this sign — 800-522-5599 — appears to no longer be in service.
It can possibly come back. A payphone at a mechanic shop near me went dead for a year and a half, then yanked out. 4 months after it was yanked out, a fresh new aluminum payphone took the spot where the old phone used to be. Something similar also happened to a bus stop payphone near me. An old dirty PTS phone with a Bell Atlantic booth went dead for about 5 months, then replaced with a new blue pedestal with a polished clean phone. There could possibly be hope for this phone. It either just takes a heck of a long time for the company to do something about it or someone has to call the phone co to repair it.
Yeah, I should maybe not be so pessimistic.
A couple of PTS phones at Queensboro Plaza were dead for about a year before coming back alive.
Now they’re gone altogether, though.
If any of the pay phones still collect coins to make calls who is collecting the profits? Or are used so infrequently that the phones don’t ever fill up?
The phones I’d encountered around Central Park were all set to let the coins go straight through to the coin return. So nobody lost any coin. But not all dead phones are like that. They just take your money and keep it until they get so full you can’t stuff one more coin into it.