SURFACE
We scoured the New York Times photo archive for the humble but popular pay phone.
As New York City’s drive to eliminate pay phones from the streets is completed this week, a recognizable part of the city’s life and landscape has become a memory. Today, it’s easy to forget that pay phones were once essential to New Yorkers’ daily lives. In 1978, the payphones at New York’s Penn Station were the busiest in the country, with an average pick-up rate of 5,500 times a month.
Two telephone repairmen replace a cut cable at a pay phone bank in Greenwich Village. In the 1970s, the New York Telephone Company hired 500 repair workers to perform daily checks on the city’s 8,300 street phones.
At the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, curved booths added some soundproofing to calls.
Some payphone designs are in keeping with the neighborhood’s ethnic identity, like this photo taken in 1976. The phone booth is decorated with a green and green-inspired roof and yellow has been installed in Chinatown in the 60s.
“The ‘glass wall’ is the conquest of the modern era,” stated the Modernist architect Le Corbusier in a 1935 article praising the virtues of glass. “This enclosure will be made up of a rigid lattice of iron, concrete or even wood, bonded to a mesh of translucent or transparent material: glass.” These sleek pay phone booths fit his description, rising from city sidewalks alongside the glass and steel skyscrapers of the 1950s.
A bomb squad detective inspects a phone booth in Grand Central in 1956.
Requires minimum voltage, payphones are a lifesaver during power outages and inclement weather.
In 1983, a young professional made himself comfortable calling from this makeshift seat. For many New Yorkers, pay phones are an important part of the workday.
Callers use makeshift pay phones brought in after a 1975 fire in the East Village disrupted service. Similar banks of emergency pay phones have been brought into Chinatown when the vicinity lost phone service for almost four months after the September 11 attacks.
A woman makes a call from Penn Station at one of the busiest pay phone banks in the country. A New York Times story in 1979 discussed private payphone booths at Tiffany’s aimed at the Bell Telephone Company’s transition from the booths to more open stand-alone phones.
A woman leans on a payphone at a subway station platform in Times Square while trying to stay cool on a wet day in July 1980.
Children gather to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from atop a row of pay phone booths in 1980.
A midtown phone booth in 1984 shows an early example of advertising on a payphone. After coin earnings from calls began to dwindle, pay phones experienced a second gold rush, which turned out to be highly profitable thanks to the ad space.
A ConEd employee made a call from the scene of an exploding manhole cover at 48th Street and Lexington.
Vandalized phones were displayed outside the Midtown office of New York Telephone in September 1984. The company reported a sharp increase in vandalism that summer, as the cost of calls local area increased from 10 to 25 cents.
Ann Chen is an artist, educator, researcher and filmmaker. Aaron Reiss is a multimedia journalist, researcher and cartographer.
Surf is a visual column that explores the intersection of art and life, produced by Alicia DeSantis, Jolie Ruben, Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick.
