This old payphone was the site of a descanso in memory of a 10-year-old Australian girl killed at this spot in a ghastly car accident. A friend of mine — an eyewitness to the crash — described it as “the most Godawful thing I ever saw in my life.” Local residents and witnesses to the crash continued to leave mementos at the site for over a year, with fresh candles and teddy bears appearing regularly until the payphone was taken out of service and removed.

I learned of Sabrina Mangos’ horrifying death in September, 2011, after reading a printout of a Daily News story affixed to the payphone enclosure, formerly located at 31st Street and 34th Avenue in Astoria, Queens. Her funeral in Australia drew over 1500 mourners.

Family and friends have since turned tragedy into a positive by creating a charitable foundation in Sabrina’s name. The Sabrina Mangos Foundation remains active, and since 2012 has donated money to numerous charities.

I never could disassociate the phone with what happened there, but it was a source of other memories, too. This was among the first payphones I used for a project in which I called a voicemail box and left messages which were automatically transferred to Sorabji.MOBI, my experimental site in which all content was posted from mobile devices and non-desktop computers. I wanted to capture the rugged, monochrome sound of the landline (and the public telephone in particular) while connecting with a small cadre of people who still visited that web site. The substance of the calls got progressively more depressing as I was going through a particularly rough period of my life.

You can get a feel for what calls from this phone sounded like by listening in to this recording from November 2, 2012. I had gone out to Calvary Cemetery that day to see how much damage Sandy had caused:

Whatever insulation this enclosure could offer from noise was welcome given the phone’s location underneath an above-ground subway. You can hear that train roar by about 15 seconds into this recording.

An interesting characteristic of certain payphones around here was how call quality deteriorated the longer the call was connected. In this call my voice sounds reasonably clear at the start but gets progressively more garbled. I speculated that payphone service providers intentionally set it up like that so calls would end quickly.

There were filthier payphone enclosures in town but this one was pretty nasty. With God-knows-what encrusted on its inside panel and ageless graffiti permanently scrawled thereupon the enclosure made it feel like I had stepped into a swamp. It seemed to permanently smell of urine, cigar smoke, and mystery scents that made my eyes water.

This volume button actually worked, which was useful given the phone’s proximity to the noisy subway train.

Manufactured by the Acoustics Development Corporation of Northbrook, Illinois, the enclosure appears to be identified in this barely-readable plaque as a “Wired Outdoor Telephone Booth.” Most people use the terms “phone booth” and “payphone” synonymously. I try to be strict about using the term “phone booth” in reference only to payphone enclosures with doors that close all the way behind you. That would make this an enclosure and not a booth.

I frequently used this phone years ago. My landline phone service was disrupted for a couple of weeks and this was the only payphone within walking distance that actually worked. At the time I remember there being many other phones that were closer but none of them ever had dial tone.

I also used this phone a few times to call 311. I remember reporting dead livestock lying in the middle of a street, and an abandoned vehicle that had been parked nearby for 8 months. In the former case I had spotted a bag of dead birds on Northern Boulevard and thought it odd enough to call 311. In the latter case I called for a third time to report an abandoned vehicle, mentioning in passing that the car was being broken into by a group of kids. With that I was transferred to 911, as this was a crime in progress. I asked why they can’t just get rid of the source of the problem rather then chase after the crime it attracts.

I also called 311 from this phone to report a crosswalk signal on 21st Street that had been turned at a 45-degree angle, making the WALK signal appear exactly where the DON’T WALK signal should have been. I made that 311 call after seeing a couple of elderly people who saw that errant WALK signal calmly stroll right into traffic as car horns wailed at them and drivers cursed.

The phone’s number — 718-278-9720 — is the third record listed on this New York City payphone numbers page, one of countless pages at The Payphone Project which lists past locations of public telephones. It can be interesting to browse those lists for the names of forgotten places that have disappeared since the list was more current in the mid to late 1990s. I have no memory of a Kafe Lloyd at 36-19 Broadway, and no other trace of it is found through a cursory search of the Internet, but its memory endures on the above mentioned page thanks to the fact that a payphone was once located at or near its location.