What’s On Top?

This pagoda-topped payphone in Chinatown reminded me of a series of pictures sent to The Payphone Project many years ago.

My friend Chris, over at Christop.com, was living in Paris during the World Cup in 1998, at which time France Telecom had embarked on a unique payphone-related public art project.

In honour of the World Cup, and as a promotion to encourage visiting fans to call home, France Telecom decorated thirty-two phone booths along the famous grands boulevards of Paris between the Place de la République and the Place de la Madeleine.

Chris was generous enough to photograph all 32 of these payphones, and to share the photos with this web site. The pictures, taken with a digital camera of mid-1990s quality, are not crystal clear as one might expect to see on a web page these days, but they are no less valuable for their documentation of this unique public art project.

Chris is also responsible for Going Up, a fun story about the author’s search for the payphones of the Eiffel Tower.

The Chinatown payphone reminds me that I habitually inspect strange and random objects that land on tops of payphones. Lately I have spotted bicycle equipment, emptied liquor bottles, coins, notes scribbled on loose leaf papers, etc. Most recently I found two decks of playing cards stashed in a crevice of a payphone enclosure on 5th Avenue in Manhattan.

Their placement seemed conspicuous, and I was skeptical about the decks of cards, presuming them to be part of some ill-reputed pursuits.

Sure enough, I sorted the two decks of cards and they were both stacked. One deck had 56 cards with 5 Aces and 6 Kings, the other deck had similarly skewed variations on the authentic 52-card lineup. I don’t know who put those cards there or why but I suspect someone left them for another card-hustling partner to pick up and use in one of the underground poker matches that are illegal but still quite popular here.