A Times Square Payphone’s Unique Memorial

Whoever removed the payphone from this wall at the Times Square subway station seems to have done so with a sense of humor. The space once occupied by a functional working payphone is now taken by the grungy, muddy stains of the payphone’s remains. Crowning that payphone palimpsest is a unique calling card: a pair of “4 MINUTES FOR $1.00 WORLDWIDE” plaques, deliberately left as if in memory of the payphone that used to be.

PTS Payphone Call Worldwide Plaques at Times Square Subway Station
PTS Payphone Call Worldwide Plaques at Times Square Subway Station

The New York City payphone observer of today would recognize these plaques as those which appear on public telephones in subways and other indoor locations throughout the city. They are also found across the United States on thousands of payphones owned by Pacific Telemanagement Services (PTS), the nation’s largest payphone service provider.

The number of payphone companies still in business in the U.S. is said to be about 200. Some of these are one-person operations where the business of maintaining payphones has essentially become a hobby for the proprietor. In other cases larger telecom operations subsidize their payphones with revenue from other parts of the business, making public telephones available as a public service.

PTS, which acquired scores of payphones from the likes of Verizon and AT&T, has been the leader of the payphone industry in the U.S. for several years. The company’s CEO has happily conceded that PTS’s business model follows a “buggy-whip strategy“. Yet, as hard as it might be for the general population to believe, there really is money being made in payphones. That’s because it simply does not take much usage for a payphone to be profitable. A few calls a day and you’re in business. According to PTS the company’s revenue in 2012 totaled $100,000,000.

The payphone that used to hang here might be gone but its memory lives on with the placement of these phantom plaques. How long they will remain in this place will be of interest to the Payphone Observer, a species of New Yorker I think is more common than might be assumed. I have noticed numerous ghostly outlines on the walls at Times Square, such as the one seen in the photo above. These shadows of payphones past are found throughout the Times Square subway station. Dozens of payphones which used to inhabit that underground transit hub have been whittled down to maybe 5 or 6.

PTS Plaque. 4 Minutes for $1.00 Worldwide
PTS Plaque. 4 Minutes for $1.00 Worldwide

I’m happy to say that of the few remaining payphones at the Times Square station one of them happens to be a favorite of mine. I hope its dial tone hums well into the future. I might be keeping that payphone in business as its most loyal customer. It is the payphone I have used most often to capture sounds of subway buskers and musicians who perform nearby. The most recent music I got from that payphone was of Maestro Moses Josiah on the Musical Saw.



2 thoughts on “A Times Square Payphone’s Unique Memorial

  1. You mean there are places where payphones still exist? Not where I live! If you don’t own a cellphone and get stranded somewhere, you’re SOL. (Big-city residents can pick their jaws up off the floor now; in small towns and rural areas nationwide, “staying connected” simply isn’t a priority.)

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    1. I hear ya. I was upstate New York last year. None of those small towns had any kind of working public telephone. I saw a number of abandoned non-working phones, though. It was only when I crossed over to Canada that I started seeing Bell Canada payphones. Scary to think how isolated you could be just for losing your cell phone.

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