I paid $1 for this story. That’s what it cost to keep a payphone at the Broadway/Lafayette Street subway station alive so I could record a ½ hour worth of a trumpet player performing on one of the lower level platforms. The payphone is blessed with a phone number I bet any New York City business would love to have: 212-777-9600. The number is listed twice on the Payphone Project’s data museum of mostly defunct payphone numbers and locations, though neither listing got the correct location: first, second.
Here is a photo of 212-777-9600, followed by a shot of where I positioned the handset in an attempt to best capture the sound of the trumpet music floating up from downstairs.
Subway payphones charge 50¢ for 15 minutes of call time, unlike most NYC payphone that charge 25¢ for 3 minutes. That is why this post cost me $1, and not the $2.50 it would have cost using New York’s curbside payphones. This 150% savings crossed my mind today after I spent a good amount of time two days ago crafting a story and a tweet to the people of Visible, a newish phone company that placed ads on the side of some NYC payphones around town.
I questioned Visible’s claim that “$40 gets you 2 hours on this pay phone“, as stated on one of their payphone advertisements. $40 would actually get you 8 hours of local call time on that payphone. Of course that would be all you’d get. That is no payphone of the future, with blinking screens and garbage quality phone calls. Just a trusty old fortress-like device that lets you make phone calls. No Internet or Netflix for the lowly payphone user.
Visible followed suit with The Smart City, LinkNYC, the City of New York, and countless other entities: They ignored me. Maybe I didn’t make enough effort to make it clear I am not an asshole. Would a smiley face have ameliorated their disdain?
I don’t know but I would have thought any company of Visible’s youth and ambition would have seen the humor in this and welcomed the opportunity to admit that they don’t know a lot about payphones in these days of 2019.
Or maybe I’m a bit naïve. Maybe the person who provided Visible with inaccurate rate information got their ass fired. I don’t know. The corporate caste system keeps away from riff-raff like me — and you.
As best I could tell 212-777-9600 is the only working payphone at the Broadway/Lafayette station, which connects to the Bleecker Street 6 train station. At Bleecker Street I found two dead payphones showing numbers from area codes from Chicago and its suburbs: 312-942-9646 and 847-615-9170.
A call to 312-942-9646 returns this audio jewel:
Calls to 847-615-9170 reward the caller with this:
The black rectangles above and below the payphone handset signal this payphone’s abandonment. Employee Toilet.
847-615-9170 looks like this:
