I spotted this old favorite a couple of weeks ago. Located on Bayard Street in New York’s Chinatown, it is a payphone enclosure with a Chinese-themed pagoda on top.
I first shared a photo of this distinctive payphone on The Payphone Project in January, 2010. At the time these phones were owned by Verizon.
Today Titan360 owns and maintains these payphones, which appeared to be in working order when I spotted them in early June, 2013.
It’s nice to see that Titan retained the pagoda styling of this phone. It is better still to find that the phones themselves actually work.
The phone numbers appear to be unchanged from when Verizon owned them: (212) 962-8203 and (212) 577-9768.
Here are links to some Chinatown phone booth photos from around the web. These photos are from past and present, but mostly from the past. Boston’s Chinatown has a stylized phone booth that appears to still exist, but most of these style booths are probably gone by now:
- Phil Pasquini: Chinatown San Francisco
- Boston: Chinatown Payphone at Harrison and Kneeland
- Angry Asian Man: NYC Chinatown Phone Booth, 1971
- AP: NYC Chinatown Phone Booth, 1962
- Eric Cousineau: Chinatown Phone Booth (Sherwood Park, Canada)
- Bangkok, Thailand: Chinatown Phone Booth
- JPG MAG: Grant Street, San Francisco
- Chicago’s Chinatown phone booth: Rotary dial! (via Canoe Communications).
- Paul Sableman: Seattle’s Chinatown has (or had) a small pagoda-topped payphone.
- Mike Laplante: Victoria, Canada’s Chinatown Phone Booth
- Jp Corkery: Photo from San Francisco’s Chinatown, 2006.
- Moroccogirl: North Vancouver, Canada.
- Simon Law: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
- lmurphy: Sacramento, California.
- Ama in Washington: Philadelphia’s Chinatown
