The Payphone Project
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Dead Phones in Jamaica, Queens. February, 2025.
These charmers are a recent discovery for me.
Payphone Project on the TODAY Show, 1999
I procured a VCR for the purpose of digitizing some of my old VHS tapes moldering away in a bedroom drawer. The VHS tapes filling my bureau drawers are almost all unmarked, but after getting the VCR in January I finally, after many years of intending to, started wading through them. I knew this was
A Bronx and Marble Hill Payphone Stramble [Video]
Starts at the Fordham Road subway, where one of the phones I looked at a couple of years ago remains, succumbing to forces of entropy and telephonic decay. The real destination was a random payphone clamshell I spotted on Cyclomedia, the underrated and basically unknown alternative to Streetview for New York City. From there it s
Unexpected Payphone Find on Atlantic Avenue in Queens
An unexpected payphone find in Ozone Park, Queens, led to a trip through its Streetview then-and-now history from 2007, when the phone probably still worked, through 2022. My video shows what this forgotten Verizon relic looks like today. This is also a test to see if I can get video to play from the top page, not just on the story page.
Iowa Payphone Defends Itself. AP Story from October, 1984.
Funny story about a payphone call that went horribly, horribly wrong.
Google’s BARD Spouts Bullshit as Fact With Respect to LinkNYC
How many hacks and cyber attacks have targeted the LinkNYC network? According to a report by Motherboard, the LinkNYC network has been targeted by at least 10 hacks and cyber attacks since its launch in 2016. The most recent attack, which occurred in January 2023, allowed hackers to access the personal information of millions of
Payphones on Maui. December, 2022.
As recently as 2016 Hawaii had the most payphones per capita of any state in the union. Most of Hawaii's payphones are owned and operated by Hawaii Telecom, the regional phone company for the state. Payphones in the other 49 of these United States of America are run by COCOTs. Now you know.
Abbé Franz Liszt Talking on a 5th Avenue Payphone as Cosima Wagner Looks On. Summer, 2016.
Not impressed by Dall-E's attempts at American-style payphones. Or Franz Liszt. Or Cosima Wagner. Or Warren Beatty.
Fresh LinkNYC Carnage
I had not seen this kind of damage to a LinkNYC machine in some time, though I ve not paid as much attention to these machines as in times past. They remain about the same as ever in terms of reliability. Sometimes a phone call works, sometimes it does not. You just never know what to
History is Being Rewritten, One AI Prompt at a Time
On three separate occasions I asked ChatGPT what it knew about LinkNYC. It got several facts wrong but presented a typically convincing-sounding mishmash of accuracy and lies. Even I wanted to believe the bullshit. It didn t occur to me right away, but I figured it couldn t hurt to see what AI thought it knew about
Ascot Communications: Abandoned Payphone
It s true. I don t here much these days. That doesn t mean my hands are idle. Quite the opposite. I don t know when it happened, or if there was a moment of clarity, but posting stories to websites started to feel like futility incarnate. Why post here to an audience of a few dozen when inane
VIDEO: The Fallen Phone of Flushing Fields, and a Genuine “Last Payphone of New York City”
A search for the fallen payphone of Flushing Fields turned up an unexpected find nearby, making for two abandoned and long-dead Verizon rigs on the same city block. How many of these ghost payphones remain, lurking on New York City's sidewalks?
Is *THIS* the Last CityBridge Payphone of New York City?
That payphone is supposed to be gone. The City and DoITT made the bizarre and uninformed announcement in May that the last sidewalk payphones of New York City had been plucked from a spot near Times Square. How could they forget this one, and the numerous others that remained until a few months after that echo-chamber of a press event?
Found Some Flatbush Payphones (Video)
I used my patent-pending technique of reverse-engineering public information to locate derelict and decrepit payphones in Flatbush on Sunday. (Just kidding about the patent thing.) I expected three devices but found only two. It turns out one of them had been tweeted to my timeline a couple of months ago. At the start of this