Give CityBridge some credit. The company takes care of its payphones. I spotted a rogue-looking payphone in a sketchy part of town about a month ago. I call a payphone “rogue” when it lacks identifying information about who owns the device, how to report money lost, maintenance issues, etc. That phone, lacking any informational placards at all, fit the bill.

But current-looking advertisements for coconut water on all three of its ads panels signaled to me that, despite the phone’s sketchy appearance, CityBridge actually owned it. Those ads, appearing on other CityBridge phones around town, would almost certainly not appear on a rogue device.

I deduced that someone must have stolen the informational placards. Their reasons remain anybody’s guess.

I was right. A return visit to what I’ve nicknamed the Sex Offender Payphone reveals that CityBridge discovered the missing placards and placed new ones in their wake. Hooray for the old new world.

A couple of thoughts on the content of this placard.

The vestigial presence of the IPANY logo at the top right corner refers to the Independent Payphone Association of New York. That trade group, comprising at one point hundreds of payphone service providers throughout the state, no longer has a presence in New York City. Why CityBridge, the monopoly franchise that erased the IPANY from the city, retained its logo is a bit of a mystery.

Also, the toll-free number exchanges listed in column 3 only include 800, 888, 877, and 866. Not shown are the newer toll-free exchanges: 855, 844, and 833. That does not mean calls to numbers on those exchanges would not go through. But it likely means your call would not connect unless you deposited 50¢. Many of CityBridges payphone were never programmed to recognize the newer toll-free exchanges as toll-free. These phones ask for 50¢ for 2 minutes, a more-or-less standard rate for long distance calls made from payphones.

Here is what the newly-placed upper placard looks like. This placard contains the payphone’s unique PPT ID#. That’s information you can use if you want to determine where to find this “sex offender country” of which I speak.

My potentially offensive nickname for this phone stems from its location in an area where a notable concentration of sex offenders reside. I discovered this years ago, when a woman I briefly dated had a conspicuous preoccupation with sex offender registries. We spent part of one date night typing zip codes into various SO registries. This revealed that the residential buildings near this payphone had notable concentrations of men who’d done horrible things, mostly to underage girls.

CityBridge, the confusing consortium of tech and media companies responsible for the LinkNYC rollout, maintains responsibility for maintenance of the city’s remaining payphones. A lot of folks, if they have reason to think of it at all, assume Verizon or a city agency maintains payphones.

In fact Verizon exited the payphone business altogether years ago, handing off their stable of payphones to private, for-profit companies. Until the end of 2015 over a dozen such companies, many of them staffed by just one or two people, maintained roughly 7,500 payphones across the city. Today only one company, CityBridge, has authority to operate payphones on city property.

I put the image of CityBridge placard through a convert-to-text widget. Read it in all its glory below.