Saying goodbye to The city’s last public pay phone booth 50th and 7th. Times square @1010WINS pic.twitter.com/n5YgfkITHx
— glenn schuck (@glennschuck) May 23, 2022
May 23, 2022
The end of the world as we knew it.
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I watched a movie last night and it involved pay phones. Pay phones and smoking in a movie looks so weird now.
Where is Superman going to change his clothes?
The country stopped caring about public transportation when it assumed everyone would buy a car, so everyone felt compelled to buy a car, and some people still regret that.
Now we've done the same thing to communications, and people have to pay the same homage to the cellphone companies that they do to auto and oil companies. Will we come to regret that as well?
The last pay phone I encountered was no longer ATT. The pay phone had been sold to a private business, and the call was expensive.
Furthermore, when was last time you handled coins??
Sucks for people like me, who refuse to own a cell phone. Not that I would consider stepping foot in NYC when it is run by progressives ever again.
You sure they're not stealing it?
"Saying goodbye to The city’s last public pay phone booth - 50th and 7th."
They should have left it as a piece of history. Now some artist will put it back and sign it.
No better way to catch something communicable in NYC than using one of those
Remember when every airport had banks and banks of pay phones near the waiting areas?
It’s going to be harder to move about the matrix.
I guess you can't drop a dime on anyone anymore...
Two and a half years into a respiratory virus pandemic and they still had public phones on the street?
I suppose the other diseases on the phones would have made short work of the novel SARS-Cov-2 virus.
What a shame! Those would have held a 2024 Biden rally apiece!
"Private pay phones on public property will remain, as well as four "walk-in" old-school phone booths located on West End Avenue, at 66th, 90th, 100th and 101st streets."
I lived at the end of the block from one of these four "walk-in" phone booths (which still remain).
It's not a booth. Those are just pay phones.
Hard to believe these are the very last in NYC. Jails?
Still remember using a phone card at a pay phone in Penn Station to say when i was arriving in NJ for pickup, and learning it had been used for calls to middle east right after. Phone rep said thieves could read numbers as dialed. Reason pay phones had side blinders.
During a road rally about 25 years ago, one of the objectives was to get a picture (Polaroid!) of an outside pay phone. Drove around the western Detroit suburbs and finally found one after 45 minutes or so.
I guess it really is a good thing that Superman isn’t real.
In my office building we have a pay phone both with no phone in it. Once I put a sign on the door with the Superman "S" and the comment Be Bsck Soon.
There are few enough places in midtown Manhattan where a man could take a leak.
1975 in Bloomington. There was a pay phone complete with a glass booth in the front yard of a house one block down from me. Another century, another world.
There's a phone booth in an old SF coffeehouse I use. Houses an ATM. Cash only coffee.
I lived on 99th and WEA 45 years ago. No memory of pay phones nearby.
madAsHell said...
Furthermore, when was last time you handled coins??
I still have the same $20 bill in my wallet that I had the day the pandemic began. I have had no need to use cash since then. Debit cards are another matter.
In the movie, "Adventures in Babysitting", (1987) Elizabeth Shue's character's friend lost her glasses and ends up in a Chicago bus station. She tries to use the phone booth but a homeless guy shouts at her to get out of his house. She sees what she thinks is a kitten because she can't see without her glasses, and thinks it's a kitten. Hilarious.
In the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie, Clark Kent, looking for a place to transform himself, comes upon one of those 2/3-of-a-bubble "phone booths," looks it up and down, and ducks into a nearby revolving door, emerging as Superman. The entire scene takes about 2 seconds. I miss Christopher Reeve.
FWIW:
A real phone booth in NYC had a door. Since the "last public pay phone booth in NYC" didn't have a door, it wasn't a real phone booth. Hence, fake news.
The Wikipedia page for "Telephone Booth has pictures of both replicas of British red telephone boxes [they don't call them "booths" in the UK and they're made out of wood] in South Lake, Pasadena, California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_booth#/media/File:Lightmatter_phonebooths_(_South_Lake,_Pasadena,_California).jpg
Also, a "Classic style mid-20th century US telephone booth [probably made out of aluminum], still intact in La Crescent, Minnesota, May 2012."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ClassicTelephoneBooth.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_booth
"I lived on 99th and WEA 45 years ago. No memory of pay phones nearby."
One block south and one block east from where I lived from 1981 to 2021.
Dont forget when you'd zip into a booth to get some address out of the book and that page had already been ripped out.
"A real phone booth in NYC had a door. Since the "last public pay phone booth in NYC" didn't have a door, it wasn't a real phone booth. Hence, fake news."
The four phone booths that remain on West End Avenue and 101st, 100th, 90th, and 66th Streets are actual booths with doors that close. However, they do not take coins.
Waterfall 8-3409
Waterfall was short for 92
I remember seeing endless banks of public phones at McCormick Place all being used.
Calling Cards
Calling cards on Rotary dials.
Now I can dial people with my butt.
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