At least 90% of the American population owns a cellular telephone, which means pay phones have mostly gone out of use. I can count the number of times I've used a pay phone on one hand (2, maybe 3 times) and I only used them because I had forgotten my cellular telephone or I left it somewhere. I'm sure that they go unnoticed by most passerby.
However, there's this website that serves as a digital ode to pay phones. The story about how this website came to be is pretty great, but I'll let the author, Mark Thomas, speak (as it were) for himself (the story includes anonymous piano recordings and audio voyeurism[!!!]).
Mark has archived the list of all the telephone numbers he received. Beside some of them are these great descriptions of where these public telephones are:
Inside Associated Student Body room at the Hanford High School East Campus. Many students come in here to partake of vending machine food and soda, or to get out of the rain. (209) 583-9856
This phone booth is in a big parking lot of an Exxon station in Galt, CA just So. of Sacramento along Hwy.99. (209) 745-9910 It's pretty lonely out there.
Phone located outside of a little market in the little farming community in Strathmore Ca in the Central California. The only town in California where the females outnumber the guys 5 to 1........Just ask for Greg, he's got all the connections. (209) 568-9098
by food 4 less on alamo dr. i'm always at this payfone waiting for someone to call, gimmie a call any weekday around 6 p.m., btw, my names joe (707) 448-9830
And so on and so forth.
The pictures submitted are both quick snapshots, meant to instruct and illustrate more than anything, and more carefully framed shots, ones you just know the person took while they were walking around alone. They have this feeling that Edward Hopper was able to capture so well in the American landscape and that I find so oddly comforting to look at.
I really like this small online museum. What's great is that the website seems to have surfaced sometime in 1995 and is still being updated. Mark Thomas encourages people to send him photographs of pay phones and their respective phone numbers, though you are not able to call most of them anymore. Having websites like this, and people like this, allow you to be a little more aware of the things that are often looked over: small, but not necessarily trivial things, that can help add depth to our lives.
