Goodbye to the last payphone in NYC

iu
 

"Thursday, June 22 — America’s first public phone booth was installed this month in 1880 in New Haven, Connecticut, just four years after the telephone was invented. These first public telephones were supervised by attendants, while those operated by coins came along nine years later.
The first coin-operated pay phone was installed in 1889, in Hartford."
1st-pay-phone-booth.jpg
 
The demise of pay phones is, I suspect, simply a business decision. You can not expect the phone companies -- privately owned corporations -- to maintain pay phone networks if they are losing money.
 
Blessed said:
@MarkinPhx , I know. I had taken my mother to buy groceries and she collapsed in the store. I did not have a cell phone. People just stood there looking. I asked them to get someone to call 911. To find a store employee, no one moved. I said if you have a phone will you please call for help, only then did a person pull out their cell and call. They had the technology and could not be bothered to just dial 911. What is the point of technology if people won't use it to help someone in trouble.
Click to expand...
That comes under the heading of .........I don't want to get involved. In the US that is the common reaction.....Walk away, turn your head, become invisible, duck any form of responsibility. Could that come from the "guns everywhere " thing ? Here in Canada pay phones are still around and maintained as a means of emergency communications for the public to use. Jimb.
 
jimintoronto said:
That comes under the heading of .........I don't want to get involved. In the US that is the common reaction.....Walk away, turn your head, become invisible, duck any form of responsibility. Could that come from the "guns everywhere " thing ? Here in Canada pay phones are still around and maintained as a means of emergency communications for the public to use. Jimb.
Click to expand...
Please do not stereotype all Americans. I know Canadians do not appreciate it either. Thank you.
 
Purwell said:
We still have some in the UK but they are disappearing fast.

There used to be two near me within about 15 minutes walk, one was smashed up most weekends by drunks and the other one used mostly for drug dealing, both gone now.
Click to expand...
The iconic red phone booths in the UK have a new lease of life. You can buy one for just a pound. There are still some, pre-decimal coin phones, still working. I saw one on the platform of a heritage railway. It cost four old pennies to make a call. You could buy four old pennies at the platform shop, they cost 20p each, some inflation!
 
Officials selected CityBridge to develop and operate LinkNYC kiosks, which offer services such as free phone calls, Wi-Fi and device charging. The city began removing street payphones in 2015 to replace them with the LinkNYC kiosks.

There are nearly 2,000 kiosks across the city, according to a map from LinkNYC.

“Just like we transitioned from the horse and buggy to the automobile and from the automobile to the airplane, the digital evolution has progressed from payphones to high-speed Wi-Fi kiosks to meet the demands of our rapidly changing daily communications needs,” Commissioner Matthew Fraser said in the release.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/23/new-york-city-removes-the-last-payphone-from-service.html
 
RadishRose said:
Officials selected CityBridge to develop and operate LinkNYC kiosks, which offer services such as free phone calls, Wi-Fi and device charging. The city began removing street payphones in 2015 to replace them with the LinkNYC kiosks.

There are nearly 2,000 kiosks across the city, according to a map from LinkNYC.

“Just like we transitioned from the horse and buggy to the automobile and from the automobile to the airplane, the digital evolution has progressed from payphones to high-speed Wi-Fi kiosks to meet the demands of our rapidly changing daily communications needs,” Commissioner Matthew Fraser said in the release.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/23/new-york-city-removes-the-last-payphone-from-service.html
Click to expand...
With the continental US population, in the neighborhood of 334,638,037 in 2022, that makes for a mighty big neighborhood. We can't ignore the future....bring it on!
 
"In the 1993 AT&T concept video “Connections” a young woman exits a plane and her parents meet her in the terminal (how retro is that!). Rather than whip out her cellphone the moment she touches down as we’re so apt to do here in the future, she proceeds to tell her parents that before making their way to baggage claim, they need to stop at the payphones — the video payphones."

ep1-visaphone.jpeg
 
So you're in a bad part of town, someone grabs your purse which has your cellphone and car keys. Start walking I guess.

I was called for jury duty last year. My husband dropped me off and I said I'd call a cab when I was ready to come home. I didn't make the cut, so I went looking for a payphone in the courthouse and realized there were none. All the offices in the huge court house were closed and the jury room was in session. Fortunately, the only other person who was not selected was a nice young man who called a cab for me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top