Weburbanist: 20 Abandoned Payphones

Weburbanist borrows a few pictures from the Payphone Project and other sources in Meet the Deadline, a showcase (if you want to call it that) of abandoned payphones.

I don’t know about the other payphones seen in Weburbanist’s collection but the abandoned payphones I documented still stand uselessly (and unattractively) at attention.

The Remains of an UnderDog Payphone stands right where it was when I wrote about it in 2009 — at which time it had already been abandoned for years. The Payphone In a Cage which I spotted last year still hangs on a wall at a conspicuous yet lonely spot on 21st Street in Long Island City. That phone appears to have been in place since the early 1990s, though I couldn’t say when it was abandoned. I happened to spot the Abandoned Yellow Payphone at the Abandoned Yellow Building on Northern Boulevard in Queens just a few days ago. Everything there remains abandoned — since at least 2008.

Not all abandoned payphones are blight. Some old payphone remains cut a beautiful profile in an accidental art manner. The Abandoned Phone Booth on Yankee Pier looks like something out of a ghost story, while the most perfectly intact abandoned payphones I have ever seen are at the mysterious Phone Booth Museum.

Unlike a lot of web site authors who scrape content from other places and make it look like they created it, Weburbanist links back to the sites from which it borrowed content and does so without injecting the evil “nofollow” tag into the mix. Thanks, Weburbanist!

Coincidentally, I recently started tagging Abandoned Payphones as appropriate in the NYC section of PayphonePictures.com.