Last Friday, I set out on a quixotic quest: to stake out, for a few hours, what are widely believed to be the four remaining enclosed phone booths in Manhattan, and to observe who, in the digital age, might choose not to email, not to instant message, not to text, not to make a cell phone call, but to instead enter a phone booth, close the door, fish a quarter from a pocket, insert it in a slot, push 10 well-worn buttons, and speak to someone on the other end.
Could such a person exist?
Verizon estimates that it owns 25,000 pay phones in the five boroughs. These are pay phones in the old style: coin-operated, no credit cards accepted. Of that 25,000, several—Verizon said they did not have an accurate count—are phone booths. And some of those may even have telephone books in them, with numbers and names alphabetically sorted—the type that, growing up in Ohio, we found indispensable for a date, or for a job interview or to call a friend crosstown. Some elderly people have even described a person once known as an “operator” who placed calls, but I believe this to be nothing more than urban legend.
Manhattan’s four free-standing phone booths, with their accordion doors, represent a relic of another time. Think Superman. These are the type that, in old movies, when a reporter is on deadline and he’s got a scoop, he runs inside, slams the doors and calls it in. It’s doubtful these days that most reporters have ever used a telephone booth. This reporter has an iPhone to call his editor.
These anachronisms are all mysteriously grouped on West End Avenue: one at West 66th, one at West 90th, one at W.est100th and one at West 101st.
On Broadway, a block away, the pay phones have been turned into functional billboards and some don’t make calls at all. But on West End, it is quite the opposite, and it is somewhat of a nostalgic pay phone user’s mecca: pay phones erected, functional and there for the stated purpose. No advertising, no gimmicks—just phones with marginally clean yellow receivers that work.
I called Verizon, the company that operates the phone booths, from my phone and asked them why the booths were still there, the last ones, all grouped together, all in good shape. Verizon said that they remained, “at the community board’s request.”
What Verizon meant by “the community board,” I would learn later, really meant one Alan Flacks, who has been described as a local “gadfly” by The New York Times and an irritant in Verizon’s ear over the phone booths for years. People around the neighborhood know him; as one doorman near W. 100th and West End put it, “Flacks! Yes, Flacks! That’s his name. He’s the reason.”
In the past, Flacks told The Times, he would call Verizon every morning if something was wrong, if there was no dial tone, or if a light was burnt out or if glass was broken. If Flacks got wind of the booths’ planned destruction, he would start neighborhood petition drives, approach the community board and send the signatures off to Verizon or the city.
“There is still a need for coin-operated pay telephones,” Flacks said this week via email. “Verizon collects from the ones in Pennsylvania Station every day. Believe it!”
A resident of a West 100th Street, rent-controlled, $200-a-month studio, Flacks is said to use his local phone booth—right at the corner—as an office on occasion, sprawling out with notebooks on the counter inside, depositing quarters, making calls. Flacks is a man of the old school. He has an email address, but not a computer. He has an answering service, but not an answering machine. He accepts calls when he’s home on an old rotary, and his answering service—a different number—is a live human. When he wants to send an email, he goes to the public library, or a courthouse downtown or the office of one of his lawyer friends.
But for all his seeming curmudgeonliness, Flacks responds to emails with stunning speed (quicker than some of my friends with BlackBerries), and he seems genuinely amused to be positioned as protector of his neighborhood’s phone booths.
“Out-of-doors pay phone booths are definitely an amenity,” Flacks said. I was inclined to believe him.
Still, their splendor was not helping me on a frigid Friday afternoon, where I stood and smoked cigarettes and staked out the two booths on West 100th and 101st, hoping to find one person who used them for something interesting—maybe to arrange a lunch-time affair, or a drug deal or a private call to one’s lawyer or to the long-lost son in Montana they’d never met.
After an hour or two, I was ready to settle for one person to use them for any reason at all.
Things were getting vaguely creepy. No one was using the phones, I hadn’t shaved in a few days and West End Avenue, normally moribund, was bustling. Kids had just gotten out of school, parents were walking their children and I was the only twentysomething in the midst, nervously walking up and down West End checking phones to ensure they worked, and looking like a phone company employee who’d lost his uniform.
Finally, I did spot someone: An older gentleman with white hair, a woolen trench coat and what looked like a faux-gold watch. He walked in, closed the accordion, inserted change, spoke briefly to someone, opened the accordion and walked out.
I ran over. “Sir! Just curious, who’d you call, if you don’t mind?”
“Huh?”
“Just a reporter, working on a story about these phone booths.”
“It’s a goddamn phone booth! Who do you think I called?”
And with that, he walked away, leaving me with the best quote I was ever going to get, and a fast-approaching deadline. I grabbed my notebook and my iPhone and headed home.
Could such a person exist?
Verizon estimates that it owns 25,000 pay phones in the five boroughs. These are pay phones in the old style: coin-operated, no credit cards accepted. Of that 25,000, several—Verizon said they did not have an accurate count—are phone booths. And some of those may even have telephone books in them, with numbers and names alphabetically sorted—the type that, growing up in Ohio, we found indispensable for a date, or for a job interview or to call a friend crosstown. Some elderly people have even described a person once known as an “operator” who placed calls, but I believe this to be nothing more than urban legend.
Manhattan’s four free-standing phone booths, with their accordion doors, represent a relic of another time. Think Superman. These are the type that, in old movies, when a reporter is on deadline and he’s got a scoop, he runs inside, slams the doors and calls it in. It’s doubtful these days that most reporters have ever used a telephone booth. This reporter has an iPhone to call his editor.
These anachronisms are all mysteriously grouped on West End Avenue: one at West 66th, one at West 90th, one at W.est100th and one at West 101st.
On Broadway, a block away, the pay phones have been turned into functional billboards and some don’t make calls at all. But on West End, it is quite the opposite, and it is somewhat of a nostalgic pay phone user’s mecca: pay phones erected, functional and there for the stated purpose. No advertising, no gimmicks—just phones with marginally clean yellow receivers that work.
I called Verizon, the company that operates the phone booths, from my phone and asked them why the booths were still there, the last ones, all grouped together, all in good shape. Verizon said that they remained, “at the community board’s request.”
What Verizon meant by “the community board,” I would learn later, really meant one Alan Flacks, who has been described as a local “gadfly” by The New York Times and an irritant in Verizon’s ear over the phone booths for years. People around the neighborhood know him; as one doorman near W. 100th and West End put it, “Flacks! Yes, Flacks! That’s his name. He’s the reason.”
In the past, Flacks told The Times, he would call Verizon every morning if something was wrong, if there was no dial tone, or if a light was burnt out or if glass was broken. If Flacks got wind of the booths’ planned destruction, he would start neighborhood petition drives, approach the community board and send the signatures off to Verizon or the city.
“There is still a need for coin-operated pay telephones,” Flacks said this week via email. “Verizon collects from the ones in Pennsylvania Station every day. Believe it!”
A resident of a West 100th Street, rent-controlled, $200-a-month studio, Flacks is said to use his local phone booth—right at the corner—as an office on occasion, sprawling out with notebooks on the counter inside, depositing quarters, making calls. Flacks is a man of the old school. He has an email address, but not a computer. He has an answering service, but not an answering machine. He accepts calls when he’s home on an old rotary, and his answering service—a different number—is a live human. When he wants to send an email, he goes to the public library, or a courthouse downtown or the office of one of his lawyer friends.
But for all his seeming curmudgeonliness, Flacks responds to emails with stunning speed (quicker than some of my friends with BlackBerries), and he seems genuinely amused to be positioned as protector of his neighborhood’s phone booths.
“Out-of-doors pay phone booths are definitely an amenity,” Flacks said. I was inclined to believe him.
Still, their splendor was not helping me on a frigid Friday afternoon, where I stood and smoked cigarettes and staked out the two booths on West 100th and 101st, hoping to find one person who used them for something interesting—maybe to arrange a lunch-time affair, or a drug deal or a private call to one’s lawyer or to the long-lost son in Montana they’d never met.
After an hour or two, I was ready to settle for one person to use them for any reason at all.
Things were getting vaguely creepy. No one was using the phones, I hadn’t shaved in a few days and West End Avenue, normally moribund, was bustling. Kids had just gotten out of school, parents were walking their children and I was the only twentysomething in the midst, nervously walking up and down West End checking phones to ensure they worked, and looking like a phone company employee who’d lost his uniform.
Finally, I did spot someone: An older gentleman with white hair, a woolen trench coat and what looked like a faux-gold watch. He walked in, closed the accordion, inserted change, spoke briefly to someone, opened the accordion and walked out.
I ran over. “Sir! Just curious, who’d you call, if you don’t mind?”
“Huh?”
“Just a reporter, working on a story about these phone booths.”
“It’s a goddamn phone booth! Who do you think I called?”
And with that, he walked away, leaving me with the best quote I was ever going to get, and a fast-approaching deadline. I grabbed my notebook and my iPhone and headed home.
