I discovered a small miracle yesterday at the Times Square subway station. OK, maybe “miracle” is too strong a word, but when I spotted this handset-decapitated payphone in the same state it’s been in for months I assumed, like any normal person, that the phone was dead. But it is not. I noticed that the bottom part of the handset was still intact and, for the hell of it, dropped in a couple of quarters and called my cell phone. It rang seconds later. Caller ID showed 646-366-0273, which I know to be the number of this payphone I have photographed and used numerous times.

If I called you from this payphone then you would be able to hear me but I obviously would not have any way to hear you, since the speaker part of the handset was busted away by an angry vandal. But in this particular context a phone that can only make one-way calls works for me. There happened to be a live band playing nearby, on the spot from which I’ve recorded numerous other live acts using this payphone. Here is how they sounded through a busted and bedraggled payphone. Unfortunately I did not have the presence of mind to get the band’s name, but they were playing on Saturday, June 2, at about 5pm.

For a year or even longer there were zero working payphones inside the Times Square subway station, and to be real I would not describe this phone as “working” even if, for my purposes, it works just fine. Today there is one phone over at the Port Authority that has a dial tone and seems to work. Another phone near one of the 1/2/3 train stairwells has a dialtone but the coin slot had been jammed for at least a year. Today that phone seems to work again. One phone outside the station, near the MetroCard vending machines at the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, had a dial tone last time I checked.

Speaking of transit hubs I saw last week that New Jersey Transit’s maps of the Penn Station complex actually include icons for where the payphones are located. These indicators seem to have fallen out of favor among modern cartographers. Whenever I’ve thought to look for it seems that even when places have payphones available they are not typically pointed out on maps or other guidebooks. Central Park has, as far as I know, just one working payphone; but finding it would be a matter of luck, since there is no indication on any current maps that it is even there. The same is for Grand Central Terminal, where as many as a couple dozen payphones inhabit its main floor, but none of the Terminal’s maps give any indication of this.