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Most Of The Last Remaining Pay Phones In NYC Will Be Ripped Out
By
Jen Carlson
Published Feb 28, 2020
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By
Jen Carlson
Published Feb 28, 2020
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While the private, walk-in phone booths of yesteryear have been nearly extinct for well over a decade in New York City, many open-air pay phones have remained, jammed into the concrete sidewalks, coin-operated totems to our analog days. But like the iconic phone booth before them ( of which there are only four left), their days are now numbered.
Along 9th Avenue in Hell's Kitchen there are enough non-booth public pay phones left that some locals have complained, saying they eat up valuable sidewalk space and aren't well-maintained by CityBridge, a consortium that installs, operates, and maintains public communications structures in NYC. Hearing their complaints, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson contacted the commissioner of the Department of Information, Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) late last year to facilitate in their removal.
“My office has received numerous community complaints from local residents about these antiquated pay phones, which present public safety and quality of life issues," Johnson said in a statement to Gothamist Friday. "Additionally, they take up sorely needed sidewalk space that could better serve people with disabilities, families with strollers and ease sidewalk congestion.”
All in all, thirty will be removed in Hell's Kitchen, along 9th Avenue from West 23rd to 57th Street, by the end of March. After that, DoITT will uproot about 3,000 pay phones all over the city. While they are committed to removing all of their pay phones, not all pay phones are controlled by CityBridge, so you may still see a few out there.
A pay phone graveyard found underneath the elevated West Side Highway at 135th and 12th Avenue in 2013.
This is all part of the planned long goodbye to the aging network of public phones, as CityBridge brings in more revenue-generating LinkNYC kiosks. Some of these Hell's Kitchen pay phones, and the ones taken down after them, will be replaced by those newer machines, which CityBridge also oversees, though there are no immediate plans for their installation.
Photo by Irini Arakas Greenbaum
It's worth noting that those remaining booths — all on the Upper West Side — will remain in place, per an agreement, and will continue to be maintained by CityBridge. They also now provide free phone calls. You'll find them on West End Avenue around 66th, 90th, 100th and 101st streets.
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phone booths
Corey Johnson
payphones
doitt
payphone
Jen Carlson
Jen Carlson is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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