In this year of 2016 it is surprising to find fresh installations of payphones, even in places you might actually expect to find them. One such place would be New York’s Penn Station, where yesterday I spotted these newly installed phones, not present the last time I passed through.
Penn Station houses dozens of payphones. Most are securely embedded into the buildings’ walls. Standing out in the middle of pedestrian traffic these phones look conspicuous, and even a little goofy. Their æsthetic nudity might be on account of the blue enclosures and jumbo sized lettering of the word “PHONE”. This style of payphone enclosure is still found throughout the U.S., though its population has dropped significantly in recent years. Like a lot of people even I (a “payphone otaku”, as William Gibson described me this morning) have come to associate this style of payphone with television and movie props more than with reality. My first thought on seeing these was that they were lifted from the set of “Breaking Bad”.
Here are a couple of other new payphone installations at Penn Station. The phone on the left also includes a TTY device, which is the rarest species of public telephone equipment you will see today:
I do not know exactly when these devices got plopped down just north of the Amtrak Waiting Area but their heritage ultimately derives from Penn Station’s payphone ghetto I wrote about in 2012. That amazing confluence of non-working payphones (situated on a prime slab of real estate) was eventually pared down and most of the phones removed, but not before I was able to take stock of its peculiarity. These phones formerly occupied the room seen in this photo:
It looks like the folks at PTS (Pacific Telemanagement Services) convinced Penn Station management that a quantity of phones would be of value if they were more liberally dispersed throughout the Main Concourse. Most folks rambling through Penn Station in 2012 probably had no idea there was a cluster of payphones tucked away in that corner. Yet a transit hub such as Penn Station is one of the few places where one can reasonably expect to find working payphones. As of now it is quite a bit easier to do so.
PTS own all of Penn Station’s numerous payphones, which are found throughout the facility at Long Island Railroad waiting areas and in the city subway stations. PTS owns all the working payphones found in the New York City subway system, at Broadway theaters, in prison and police precinct lobbies, at city agencies, and at other transit hubs such as Grand Central Terminal.