I noticed something recently about payphones in the Times Square area of Manhattan. There are none. Well, there are very few left. I spotted these two huddled between a food truck and a hat vendor on 45th Street near 7th Avenue.

There remain four payphones in front of the subway station entrance on 42nd Street, and one downstairs in the northwest entrance to the subway station. Until a few weeks ago you could find maybe two or three dozen working payphones in Times Square. Most of them are now, suddenly, gone. The “crossroads of the world’ has seen its population of public telephones whittled down to 7.

There are also 4 or 5 payphones inside the Times Square subway station but I am not counting those, since you have to pay a subway fare to get to them.

This payphone carnage can only mean one thing: Links are coming. Links, as anyone following this web site knows, are the “payphone of the future”, offering free phone calls, 911 access, maps, and other needless features. Once they are installed visitors to Times Square who find themselves with no other way to make a phone call will now have the ability to do so for free, albeit at the expense of their dignity and privacy. The free calls offered by LinkNYC devices are hilarious. You must bend over and yell as loud as you can for the person you call to understand a word you are saying, as evidenced by this individual I spotted a few months ago:

He sounds like he was trying to wring $500 out of somebody. Coming from the especially noisy streets of Times Square I expect one would have to yell even louder than this gentleman, who was ta 42nd Street and Third Avenue.

I noticed the payphones at Times Square were gone last weekend. This was before it was announced that CityBridge (the consortium of company’s which owns them) would remove the onboard web browser from its LinkNYC devices. The tablet browser was blamed for being the source of encampments, pornography viewing, and public masturbation. These were among many unsavory behaviors which had become synonymous with the LinkNYC program.

At the time I could hardly imagine how much more crowded and impassable the already agoraphobia-inducing sidewalks of Times Square would become when Links arrived, attracting the seemingly inevitable space-hogging encampments. I was thinking fist fights would erupt.

We are told that with the onboard web browser gone there should be fewer encampments. But given CityBridge’s track record of poor planning it remains to be seen just how effective the browser’s removal will be. By my observation there were certainly plenty of people camped out at Links, gorging on endless movies from YouTube’s Copyright Infringement Theater. But the sidewalks were almost equally hogged by individuals and groups of people charging their phones for hours on end, not even looking at the Link’s screen. Back in April (the early days of LinkNYC) I observed this individual sitting at a Link on 57th Street and Third Avenue. I first saw him around 12:30pm. Four hours later, at about 4:30, he was still sitting there.

And, as this photo of the classy tableau of humanity I documented last week shows, this encampment had nothing to do with the web browser. They were just charging their phones.

I also think that once word gets out that calls made from LinkNYC devices are virtually untraceable there will be wider usage of Link devices for all sorts of telephonic mayhem. And if Skype video-calling is ever enabled (as promised) then the porn problem will return with a vengeance.

The difference made by the removal of Times Square’s payphones may be relatively subtle considering how visually and physically congested the area is. But once I noticed they were gone I found that their absence opened up some breathing room in what can be a frighteningly crowded part of town. Times Square is utterly engulfed in advertising. Does this area even need Links? Does anybody? I wouldn’t complain if they leave it as is, and make Times Square Link-free with a small number of working landline public telephones.

The routing of payphones as seen at Times Square has also been happening on Queens Boulevard in Sunnyside. Some enclosures were still standing when I passed them by last week, but their payphones were gone. Removal of a payphone from these enclosures creates what I think is a representation of a screaming, shocked human face. From top to bottom I see two eyes (one of them bloodied), a mouth, and a fourth hole as inexplicable as the desire to rid New York City of working public pay telephones.

Based on the casual observations of this payphone observer it looks like most if not all of CityBridge’s payphones are gone from that Queens Boulevard between 51st Street and Van Dam Street. What payphones remain belong to Telebeam, the last surviving New York City-based independent payphone service provider.

Something that a lot of observers of the LinkNYC slow-moving train wreck do not seem to realize is that CityBridge owns and operates a majority of the traditional payphones in New York City. The company, a consortium of technology and advertising concerns, includes Titan, the display advertising company which acquired 1,900 payphones from Verizon in 2010. Actually what they acquired were 1,300 display advertising kiosks which, incidentally, happened to contain 1,900 payphones.  Eventually CityBridge would acquire the payphone assets of every payphone service provider in New York, minus (so far) Telebeam. Titan is the CityBridge partner which maintains thousands of payphones in New York today while also aiding in replacing them with Links.

Just outside of Times Square proper is an interesting precursor to the LinkNYC project, which is funded through revenues from a ceaseless rotation of digital advertisements appearing on their 55-inch screens. This enclosure, at 49th Street and 7th Avenue, is one of three traditional payphone enclosures placed in December, 2011, on which static display advertisements were replaced with dynamic advertising panels.

I don’t know about anyone else but I find this to be far less æsthetically offensive than the LinkNYC screens. I think it’s because the screen is smaller, it does not tower over you, and you do not see them every 50 feet as you do with Links in certain spots along the Avenues. It might also be the absence of the needlessly obnoxious “HELLO, WORLD!” and LinkNYC contact info screens that seem constantly to appear on those devices.

One wonders how different the rollout of LinkNYC might have been had it followed this model and retrofitted the old payphone enclosures with LED screens and replaced the payphones with tablet devices. The encampments would have emerged just the same but I don’t think there would be as many complaints about the ugly factor of Links. And repurposing the old enclosures would have saved a whole lot of money.

The payphone carnage at Times Square also ends the career of what may have been New York City’s most famous payphones. The twin Titan payphones at Broadway and 46th Street were worldwide objects of fascination. This was because the phones could be seen in one of EarthCam.com’s live webcam shots of that intersection. These payphones’ visibility on live camera inspired some to think that it might be possible to call them and talk to random strangers while watching them in real time. That may have been possible in decades past but I was never able to make incoming calls to those phones from when I first tried it way back in 2006.

That payphone’s fame became memory when EarthCam’s camera was removed in 2011.