New York’s only pay phone

SURFACE

At one point, you couldn’t walk 30 feet across a New York City neighborhood without hitting a pay phone. Look at the last ones.

As a curious crowd gathered in Times Square on Monday, an electric saw cut through the base of a payphone on the southwest corner of Seventh Avenue and 50th Street. According to the city’s press release, it was “New York City’s last public telephone”.

In the early 2000s, there were almost 30,000 payphones on the street registered with the city – according to Stanley Shor, who served as assistant commissioner overseeing public telephones – whitewashed five counties in booths, pedestals, bubbles and pillars. But seven years on, the city has quietly dismantled them. Now, The only official pay phones on the streets of New York City will be four permanently maintained phone booths on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

In the age of smartphones, it can be difficult to reiterate the importance of pay phones in New Yorkers’ daily lives – but there was a time when you couldn’t walk 30 feet across a city block. without encountering a telephone, around the early 2000s when roadside pay phones emerged. As Lilly Tuttle, curator at the Museum of the City of New York, explains: “New York is a crowded, pedestrian city. Until the 1940s, even half of all Americans had a telephone. If you need to make calls on the go, a public phone is absolutely essential. “

Myles MacLaren, who attended Monday’s takedown of the phone in Times Square, grew up nearby in the 1970s. He remembers phones very well. “We live in a one-bedroom apartment with six people, two dogs, four cats and two goldfish,” he said. The MacLarens have a hard time having privacy, “so the payphone on the corner was my lifeline in high school.”

Before the 1980s, telephone companies monopolized the installation, operation, and maintenance of public telephones on city streets and sidewalks, but it proved a major undertaking. By 1970, vandalism and theft – in the form of jams, or stuffing payphone slots with objects such as chewing gum, ripped matchboxes and pieces of plastic bags – had mean one in ten pay phone in the city did not work.

In 1984, pay phones were deregulated nationwide, opening the market to thousands of small and independent entrepreneurs who flocked to the game. John Porter started a pay phone business in New York City in 1997. Porter remembers this moment as a gold rush. “In the old days, you could drill holes in the sidewalk,” he said. “It’s a freelance business, people just put pay phones at whatever hotspot they can.”

But nostalgia isn’t enough to combat the growing popularity of cell phones. Pay phones are increasingly viewed as visuals.”silver leaf“And a waste of precious sidewalk real estate. In 2014, the end of pay phones on the street was finalized when CityBridge began installing LinkNYC kiosks. At the time, most pay-phone companies in New York had either gone out of business or sold their shares, often leaving their phones around town without dial tones, like the cadaver.

While pay phones have played an important role in recent emergencies like September 11 and Hurricane Sandy – when power outages and limited cell phone service brought them back into use. urgent – they are more or less appropriate for the way people communicate today. LinkNYC booths not only allow free calls to any number in the US, but also offer Wi-Fi and device charging. “It’s like we’re transitioning from horses and cars to cars, and from cars to planes,” Matthew Fraser, the city’s chief technology officer, explained in an emailed statement. city ​​technology, explained in an emailed statement, “high-speed Wi-Fi kiosks to meet our rapidly changing daily communication needs. ”

Even Thomas, who has spent decades documenting and exploring parts of this aging infrastructure, understands that not much love is lost in getting rid of pay phones. “People talk about them today as if they were magic booths of privacy and seclusion, but people really don’t like them,” he said, adding that pay phones are often stuffy and cramped. cramped and alternately used as urinals or trash cans. “I think most people’s instinct is to get out of hell as soon as possible. I think that’s the real history of the phone booth.”

Aside from defunct street pay phones that may have slipped through the cracks of the bureaucracy, all that remains are the physical scars in the urban fabric that mark where once there are pay phones: patches of freshly discolored concrete on the sidewalks, broken screw holes, rectangles of mismatched paint on the sides of buildings.

As Monday’s press conference ended, a truck carrying a payphone plowed into traffic and sped away. The Museum of New York City acquired this particular phone shelter, but Steve Flinchbaugh, a member of the dismantling team, said that most discarded phone booths end up in the yard of the house. his owner. “The sheet metal parts were peeled off and discarded. But other than that, they have no value. They are just stainless steel. “

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.