That's no phone booth. It's a freakin' art gallery. pic.twitter.com/6jJCdmF4eY
— Payphone Project (@projectpayphone) October 25, 2021
According to the franchise agreement between CityBridge and DoITT all remaining outdoor payphone enclosures are to be removed from city sidewalks by the end of 2021. It remains to be seen if CityBridge will actually make good on that requirement, or if lingering enclosures like this one have simply fallen off their radar, left forever to molder away into accidental art.
Earlier this year, and before Covid, CityBridge’s phones were being hauled off to scrap at a rapid clip. Virtually none were replaced with the promised LinkNYC kiosks, the so-called “payphone of the future originally planned to number as many as 10,000.
I do not have resource to canvas all 5 boroughs but by my observation it seems payphone removals have stagnated, if not ceased altogether. Clusters of phones I spotted in March of April still survive, though CityBridge has apparently cancelled its Verizon Wireless account and not a single one of their devices can make any kind of phone call.
It seems strange, then, to have observed that certain enclosures have been maintained and cleaned of their graffiti with resource applied to making the phones work. Fresh display advertising panels have also appeared in some locations, assuring this observer that New York City’s payphones are out there solely for the ad revenue.
In that context behold the masterpiece in the above video, a booth where forces of entropy and accumulation seem to coexist. No ads survive on this one, from which debris dangles in the air and shot bottles, emptied of their liquor, are stored and decoratively used as plant and flower holders. Who did this?
Dead fish, one dangling from an electrical wire threaded through its head, seem perfectly at peace in this display. They must have escaped from one of the abundant quantity of nearby fish markets. Wherever they came from these fish perfectly represent the state of New York city’s payphones: Dead.
The spray paint screams from being freshly applied, and while I am no advocate of graffiti I find this particular instance to be a beautiful expression of the reality of deep-pocketed companies leaving their trash behind and failing onward and upward into misguided ventures.
The phone does not work but even if it did who would want to touch it?
The base of the structure is falling away, revealing wiry guts of a payphone’s innards. It’s a real piece of work. A monument to the state of payphones in New York City in this month of October, 2021.