The Only Living Pay Phones in New York

Surface finish

At one point, I couldn’t walk 30 feet in the New York City block without seeing a pay phone. Look at the last one.

When a curious crowd gathered in Times Square on Monday, Powersaw cut through the payphone base on Seventh Avenue and the southwest corner of Fifty Avenue. According to the city’s news release, this was “the last payphone in New York City.”

In the early 2000s, there were about 30,000 toll roads on public roads registered in the city. It covered five districts: booths, pedestals, bubbles, and pillars, according to Stanley Shaw, who served as vice-committee overseeing toll phones. But for the past seven years, the city has quietly removed them.now, The only official toll phones on the streets of New York City are the four permanent phone booths on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

In the age of smartphones, it may be difficult to remember the importance of pay phones in New Yorkers’ daily lives, but at some point they couldn’t walk 30 feet in the block. In the early 2000s, the number of pay telephones on the street side increased. Lily Tuttle, curator of the Museum of the City of New York, explains: It wasn’t until the 1940s that even half of Americans had a phone. If I needed to make a call on the go, I really needed a pay phone. “

Myles MacLaren, who was attending Monday’s phone removal in Times Square, grew up nearby in the 1970s. He remembered the phone well. “We lived in a one-bedroom apartment with six people, two dogs, four cats, and two goldfish,” he said. It was difficult to ensure privacy in McLaren’s homes. “That’s why horned toll phones were my lifesaver in high school.”

Prior to the 1980s, the New York Telephone Company was the only company allowed to install payphones in New York City, but it proved to be a major business. By 1970, vandalism and theft (jamming or stuffing gum bitten into pay phone coin slots, torn matchbox covers, pieces of plastic bags, etc.) was 10 minutes of pay phone in the city. 1 meant that it stopped working.

In 1984, toll phones were deregulated by the Federal Communications Commission, opening the market to thousands of small, independent entrepreneurs who were in a hurry to participate in the game nationwide. John Porter started the toll telephone business in New York City in 1997. Porter remembers this as a kind of gold rush. “In the old days, we just made holes in the sidewalk,” he said. “It was a free company. People installed pay phones in hotspots wherever possible.”

However, nostalgia was not enough to counter the spread of mobile phones. Toll phones were increasingly seen as a visual “ravaged” and a waste of valuable sidewalk real estate. In 2015, City Bridge started installing the Link NYC kiosk, so the abolition of toll phones on the street is almost complete. By then, most companies operating toll phones in New York have either gone out of business or sold their possessions, often leaving the phone hanging in the city without dialing, like a vestigial organ. Did.

Payphones have played an important role in recent emergencies such as September 11th and Hurricane Sandy, but today’s people communicate when they return to emergency use due to power outages or limited mobile service outages. The method is more or less uncomfortable. The LinkNYC booth not only allows free calls to any number in the United States, but also provides Wi-Fi and device charging. “It’s just like moving from horses and buggies to cars, and from cars to planes,” said Matthew Fraser, chief technology officer of the city, in a statement in an email. Accelerate Wi-Fi kiosks to meet the demands of rapidly changing day-to-day communication needs. “

Even Thomas, who has spent decades documenting and investigating these parts of the infrastructure that has gone by, understands that the love lost in the removal of toll phones is not that great. “People talk about them today as if they were a magical booth of privacy and quarantine, but people didn’t really like them,” he said. “I think most people’s instinct was to get rid of hell from them as soon as possible. I think that’s the true history of phone booths.”

With the exception of old street toll phones that may have slipped through bureaucratic cracks, all that remains is the physical scratches on the urban fabric markings where the toll phone was located: fresh concrete on the sidewalk. Discolored patches, clear screw holes that are about to collapse, and patches of inconsistent paint on the sides of a rectangular building.

At the end of Monday’s press conference, a truck on a platform carrying payphones was pulled away by traffic. This particular phone shelter was acquired by the Museum of the City of New York, but removal crew member Steve Flinchbo said most of the removed phone booths had returned to his employer’s yard. He said, “Sheet metal parts are stripped and discarded, but otherwise worthless. They are just stainless steel.”

Ann Chen is an artist, educator, researcher, and filmmaker. Aaron Reiss is a multimedia journalist, researcher and map maker.

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