I brought out my boss field recorder to get all the audio of what happens when one tries to make phone calls through CityBridge’s West End Avenue phone booths. I’ve done this before but only with partial audio recorded through my camera’s mic. This time I brought a field recorder and a Radio Shack suction-cup thingy used to record phone calls.

I’ve seen a number of people call out the presence of these phones as evidence that the City and CityBridge were wrong to announce they had removed the last outdoor phone booth from City sidewalks. The “last payphone” announcement was way off base in a lot of ways but not with respect to these booths on West End Avenue.

These phone booths are supposed to be here. These were left in place by the City and CityBridge as a deliberate tribute to the rich history of the phone booth and the role it played in American culture before slowly fading from relevance. Why they chose Canadian-style booths to make this tribute has never been explained.

The franchise agreement between CityBridge and the City makes it clear these phones are supposed to work and be properly maintained. As demonstrated in this video only one phone can make a regular local telephone call. Making that happen proved to be a bit of a project.

Local calls from these phones are supposed to be free. That means I should never be prompted to “Please deposit 25¢” as happened on two of these phones. There also should not have been what amounts to a $15 deposit required to be able to make a local call.

From the beginning:

0:01 – Of the four remaining payphones on West End Avenue the one at 101st Street is the only one that actually lets you make a phone call. CityBridge appears to have let its Verizon Wireless account expire, sending this phone to a service called American Roaming.

As you can hear, to make a call from this phone you must pay by credit card, calling card, or by making a collect call (!). A minimum purchase of $15, made before I placed this call, is required. After the $15 payment was made a PIN was issued. I used that PIN to make this call.

$15 gets you three hours or, as the automated voice put it, “Two hours and sixty minutes”

of call time.

Using the American Roaming PIN I dialed in to Payphone Radio at 212-255-2748. Call quality was very poor. It is true that volume on some of the calls on Payphone Radio can be low but it’s never this low. Poor call quality was also reported by someone I know who attempted to use these phones last week.

Interestingly, caller ID for this call showed a Niagara Falls number that belongs to an individual consumer in the (716) Niagara Falls area code. I informed American Roaming of this via email.

3:17 – The phone at 100^th Street reported that there had been an error processing the call and that I should power down the phone and restart it. How the hell am I supposed to power down a payphone? I followed instructions and dialed #8899 for assistance. All the help I got was a gnarly busy signal. Rude.

5:15 – The phone at 90^th Street also reported an error processing the call, but with a difference. This phone asked me to deposit 25¢. That is what I did. In this audio you cannot hear me cursing the phone for swallowing the quarter I deposited. After the call failed to connect I hung up and the quarter went straight into the coin vault. I wonder how many quarters this fucking phone has swallowed. Sorry for the language but seriously, who leaves a piece of shit like this out on a city street.

7:08 – The last one, at 66^th Street, includes a once-repeated video of my attempts to deposit 25¢, per the automated voice instructions. I actually made the video after the call ended but you get the idea. No regular phone calls possible on this phone which, like the others, is supposed to be free for local calls.