However I might feel about vandalism (I do not condone it) I cannot deny my admiration for the persistence and coverage of whoever puts these “WE NEED MORE PAY PHONES” stickers on payphones throughout New York. I have seen these stickers on payphones from Coney Island to Corona to Lower Manhattan and all points in and around. I first spotted these words in November 2016, on a missing persons poster. It later evolved into the sticker format seen today.

I have no idea who places these stickers, or if it’s just one person or a small army. But I admire the consistency and commitment. I particularly respect that every single sticker is hand written, and not printed en masse or rubber stamped. On that basis I think it echoes the work of PRAY, that legendary scratchiti artist whose messages still linger on countless New York City payphones. While not as earnest a task as what PRAY’s work required it appears that someone among us wakes up every day and writes these words upon hundreds of stickers, then heads out into the world to spread the message.

These stickers, much easier to remove than any scratchiti, will not last as long as PRAY’s hard-coded commandments to “LOVE GOD”, “GO TO CHURCH READ BIBLE”, and other religious exhortations. But then the payphones themselves might not have much time left.

There were four “WE NEED MORE PAY PHONES” stickers on this payphone enclosure.

Heaping praise and  admiration on this pursuit has its hazards. What if it the perpetrator of these acts of vandalism steps forward to reveal it is just a big joke, a promotional campaign for an album, or simply another dose of irony in a world already saturated with self-serving memes? I might look like a fool.

To be clear, as much as I respect the determination and, in particular, the hand-crafted nature of this endeavor, I look at a picture like the one above and see nothing more than a perfectly respectable payphone that has been defaced. The end result of all this vandalism campaign will change nothing. We will never get more payphones. Sooner or later we won’t have any.

I concur with the spirit of the message, though. I think some reliable, time-tested form of public communications devices should continue to exist in New York, and this decision should be made before LinkNYC’s Smart City stampede obliterates every last payphone.