Even Being Indestructible Did Not Stop The Pay Phone’s Extinction

There are certainly people who have never seen a pay phone before. And people who are familiar with pay phones may have only seen them with push buttons. Rotary dial phones were replaced in the 1970s by push buttons. Whereas pay phones managed to remain ubiquitous until the 1990s.

Pay phones were once everywhere. You could find them in hotels restaurants, gas stations, drug stores, transportation facilities, office and public buildings and on street corners,

The ad above ran in the September 11, 1971 New Yorker magazine.

In 1970 vandals cost American Telephone and Telegraph $12 million in repairs to pay phones. The lead to the ad states, “Our armored pay phone: Why the street corner phone is no longer in danger of becoming extinct.”

AT&T was addressing the vandalism problem by making phones tamperproof. The company began making pay phones with steel-sheathed cables; recessed dials made from “unbreakable” plastic; and a special anti-theft device to prevent money from being stolen.

But it was not the vandals that made the pay phone extinct. Cell phones made pay phones obsolete.

Telephone Booth New York Public Library photo: stuffnobodycaresabout.com

There are now no working public pay telephones in New York City, though some non-working telephone booths at main branch of the The New York Public Library remain in place. Curiosity attracts people to go in a booth and pick up the phone.

Recently at JFK Airport I spotted a bank of pay phones along a wall. I did not test one to see if it was still working. I doubt it.

The city began in earnest to remove pay phones in 2014.

According to the New York City Office of Technology & Innovation, with the exception of private payphones on public property and four permanent full-length “Superman” booths, the last working public pay telephone at 745 7th Avenue was disconnected from service on May 22, 2022.