The Phone Booths at Central Park, NYC

My Sunday quest to find a single working payphone in Manhattan’s Central Park led to an unexpectedly amazing discovery: Phone booths! Real live old-style New York City phone booths with actual payphones inside.

New York City phone booths like this are unusual, but not necessarily rare. At least not for now. In my own travels I have discovered dozens of phone booths, most abandoned but some still actively in use with working payphones and phone books. If my pithy research has turned up dozens than it seems fair to guess that hundreds old booths must be lurking in buildings throughout the 5 boroughs of New York. Many of them, we further assume, or in non-public spaces or otherwise off limits to the general public.

Gaze deep into the Hall of Payphones. There are only 4 payphones here but the reflection creates an illusion of more.

I like this reflection of a payphone in one of the last of Manhattan’s old-style phone booths. These metal booths are commonly spotted in 1960s- and 1970s-era films set in New York City. Breakfast At Tiffany’s, for example, sports some phone booth and payphone appearances such as were common among films of the day.

Old-style TELEPHONE signage on these New York City phone booths.

That’s my dented face reflected off the dented inside of this old phone booth at Central Park. Why the dents? My face is not dented. The inside of this phone booth is dented. Why?

These old booths are of similar vintage as the Green Manhattan phone booths I spotted at the 79th Street Boat Basin Café in October, 2010. Images of other NYC phone booths lurk within the pages of the Payphone Project.

Phone numbers for these Manhattan phone booths are listed on the Payphone Project, albeit buried in some of the old-format pages from 1998.

The payphone numbers from left to right (with links to the Payphone Project pages containing them) are: (212) 722-9781 (link), (212) 722-9476 (link), (212) 722-9431 (link), and (212) 722-9991 (link).

None of these Verizon payphones had dial tones when I picked them up. My attempts to call the numbers from home returned automated messages announcing that these phones were disconnected.

These phone booths and the payphones therein will be gone soon, making way for a closet of some sort.

All of these payphones emitted a humming noise. This faint sign of life suggests that ghosts of dial tones past could rise again from these devices in the unlikely event that Verizon or an independent payphone provider ever fixes them.