Last pay phone in NYC

I read the other day that the last public payphone in New York City has been decommissioned.

It's the final chapter in a saga that's been unfolding since 2015, when the city started uprooting phone booths and replacing them with LinkNYC kiosks, which offer free public Wi-Fi, charging ports, 911 buttons and screens with maps and other services (they also generate revenue for the city).

LinkNYC tweeted that they will be replaced with a digital kiosk, "boosting accessibility and connectivity across the city." The company says it's deployed thousands of Links across the city, and has facilitated more than 3 billion Wi-Fi sessions with more than 10 million subscribers. (Source: NPR)

Three billion Wi-Fi sessions? How many good old-fashioned phone calls did those Wi-Fi sessions replace?

Anyway, that last phone booth will spend its golden years in the Museum of the City of New York, where kiddos will no doubt ask their parents whether it's a toilet. Or whatever. (Come to think of it, sometimes those phonebooths were used as toilets. No wonder that, over time, they switched to payphones that just had a half-height, three-sided enclosure around them. Sort of a cubicle-is-to-office version of a phonebooth.)

The demise of the payphone reminds me of a little family story. Before we decided we all had enough crazy junk, we used to do a Yankee Swap on Christmas Eve. One year, my brother-in-law's swap contribution was a rotary dial Bakelite phone. My niece Molly - then quite young - saw the letters on the dial and quite sweetly asked whether that was how people used to text.

I believe there are a few payphones still on the streets of Boston. I think there are a couple on Washington Street, and maybe one by the fire station on Cambridge. 

But there's really no need. Most people - 97% of the US population was the figure I saw for 2021 - have some sort of cellphone. Most of those cellphones are smart. I'm sure that by now even my husband, a complete and utter cell phone resister who's been gone for over 8 years now, would have caved in and gotten one by now. Correction: I would have forced him to get one by now. 

I suspect that the remaining 3% of the population that's cell phone-less are shut-ins or hermits. 

So there's really no need for payphones.

But there used to be.

Ah, payphones.

Everyone used to make sure they carried a few dimes with them so they could make a call. You called for a cab when there were none to hail. You called your parents if you were stranded and needed them to pick you up. Or to let them know that you'd arrived back at school. (Sneaky kids called their parents collect and quickly hung up. That way you could signal to your folks that you were okay without incurring the charge for a collect, long-distance call.) You called the restaurant if you were running late for a reservation. New fathers called family from the waiting room to let them know the new baby had safely arrived. You called a friend to ask them why they weren't at the meeting place. You called information to ask for an address. Or, if the tethered phone book was still there in the booth, and still usable, you looked it up for yourself. 

A person was "dimed" when someone called the cops on them. 

And you dropped a dime, even when the cost to use a payphone grew to a quarter. (No one every "quartered" a criminal to report their criming.)

Occasionally, you would give someone the number of a payphone and have them call you there are an appointed time. This technique was used by those who didn't have a phone, and by those who met regularly enough at the same place that they knew the payphone number.

Sometimes, when you were walking by a payphone, it would be ringing. Sometimes, you even picked it up. 

But that was then and this is now.

Matthew Fraser, commissioner of the Office of Technology and Innovation, described the removal of the last pay phone as bittersweet, noting the "prominent place they've held in the city's physical landscape for decades" but acknowledging that it's time for change.

"Just like we transitioned from the horse and buggy to the automobile and from the automobile to the airplane, the digital evolution has progressed from pay phones to high-speed Wi-Fi kiosks to meet the demands of our rapidly changing daily communications needs," he said in a statement shared with NPR.

Not that we transitioned from the automobile to the airplane. More like we transitioned from the train to the airplane. And from the taxicab to the Uber. But I get it. Technology, like life, goes on. (Ob‐La‐Di, Ob‐La‐Da...)

But I do have an important question:

If there are no more payphones, and no more phone booths, just where is Clark Kent going to strip out of his suit and turn into Superman?