The Old Phone Booth On Yankee Pier, NYC

The old phone booth on Yankee Pier is under lock and key, off limits but visible to passers-by, most of whom pay no mind to this lonely relic.

This defunct communications outpost, evocatively located on a condemned structure over the waters of Buttermilk Channel at Governors Island, is one of only 5 outdoor, free-standing phone booths in New York City. Numerous indoor wood phone booths still survive and some quirky pay phone enclosures in town could be labeled “phone booths” — but classic outdoor phone booths like this are rare.

It would be amazing if this old Charge-a-Call phone actually worked in this year of 2012 but that seems impossible. This public phone has probably been out of service since the Coast Guard removed Yankee Pier from active use in 1999. This simply looks like an awesome place to make a phone call. O, but to call somebody from this phone booth! O, for a dial tone!

I think there used be a second phone booth on the other end of the pier. If so it must have been discarded when that half of the pier was renovated in 2009.

I consider this a museum piece of the accidental art variety, similar to but not as excellent as the phone booth museum I encountered last year. That, my payphone friends, was a masterpiece of antique phone-boothery.

I should clarify that I am not a fan of phone booths. For all the nostalgia others sometimes direct toward them phone booths summon from me mostly sour memories of foul-smelling enclosures and clammy-handed conversations hurried through with more urgency than desire. Some of the worst phone calls of my life were made from phone booths. I frequently entered phone booths in perfect health but stepped out feeling ill.

Still, my visit to the old phone booth on Governors Island felt like a pilgrimage. I wanted to see this old phone booth again. I had no information one way or the other to say that it would or would not be there.

When I first visited Governors Island in 2007 I could only see the booth from about 100 feet away. From that distance (and without a suitable zoom lens on my camera) I could not tell if the booth contained an actual telephone. At first I was not even certain it was a phone booth.

This time I got much closer to the old phone booth, feeling like I was staring at a sad, caged zoo animal.

Presumably the phone booth will either be hauled off to garbage or (more romantically) cast into the murky deeps of Buttermilk Channel and bringing phone service to the minnows — unless NYC Parks could take an interest in preserving it. It would never be revived as an actual working pay telephone but I can imagine creative ways to gussy up and maintain this old thing, making it a functional monument.

If I had any say in the matter I might plant a 24-hour webcam atop the old phone booth, with a touchscreen tablet display linking to live images of other NYC webcams, or to information about Governors Island and Yankee Pier. Or maybe the phone itself could actually be put into use: Visitors who pick up the phone might hear a brief history of Yankee Pier and Buttermilk Channel.

Something could be done to preserve this old phone booth. Or it could be thrown away.

Click for more pictures of the Yankee Pier Phone Booth.

The other four outdoor New York City phone booths are on West End Avenue in Manhattan. Unlike this old phone the payphones inside the West End Avenue booths could be expected to work — at least for now. The payphones in those booths are owned by Verizon, a company that is exiting the payphone business altogether. The days of those phone booths are probably numbered.