It didn’t really come as a surprise when I saw the story that ATT had announced it would withdraw from the pay-phone marketplace within the next year; if anything, it’s a surprise that there are any pay phones any more, at least in urban centers around the world. But the Wikipedia article on pay phones says that ATT operates 60,000 pay phones in the U.S., and that doesn’t count the ones operated by Verizon and various other carriers. To put this in context, consider that in late 2007, ATT has 66 million cellphone subscribers, and there are 251 million cellphones, altogether, in the U.S.

The first public pay-telephone station was set up in 1878, according to the MarketWatch article, just two years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the talking device; and the first coin-operated pay phone was installed in Hartford, Conn., in 1889. In 1998, a little over a century later, there were 2.6 million payphones; but the number has been dropping steadily since then, and there are only about one million nationwide now.

I suppose I won’t miss the era of payphones, but it does represent a significant cultural transition, and I think it’s important to record at least a few memories of things many of us have taken for granted all our lives, and which today’s generation of children — e.g., my grandson, now 5 years old — simply won’t understand. For example, what will he think if he sees an old Superman movie, with Clark Kent dashing into a phone booth wearing a business suit, and emerging moments later in his blue-and-red Spandex superhero uniform? How can we have any movies where spies, crooks, and heroes-on-the-run rendezvous at pre-arranged corners in the dead of night, waiting for a call on a forlorn payphone? How can we ever explain to the new generation how unsettling it was to walk past a ringing payphone on a busy urban street, wondering whether we should stop and answer it … no, of course we shouldn’t … but what if? … could it be? … maybe the caller at the other end is desperately trying to reach the police or an ambulance … maybe we should answer it. How can we ever explain the relief, the moment of joy, that we felt when we came upon a gas station with a working payphone after driving a hundred miles through an empty desert?

The interesting thing is that my generation almost certainly had a different attitude toward payphones than did my parents’ generation. After all, there was a long period in the first half of the 20th century when the majority of ordinary citizens did not have a telephone in their home (let alone multiple phones, cordless phones, designer phones, or touch-tone phones). So the payphone was a community phone, whether it was located on a street corner, in the neighborhood bar or grocery store, or the college dormitory where it was shared by dozens of students on each floor. Try telling that to today’s university student: there was an era when students didn’t have any phone in their dorm room, let alone a cell phone they could take with them wherever they went.

Another bit of cultural trivia that will disappear with payphones is collect calls. After all, who could ever bother carrying enough dimes and quarters to make a long-distance call to someone on the other side of the country? For that matter, who could even afford such an expense? So we agonized over whether to make a station-to-station call, or a person-to-person call, and we took advantage of every possible opportunity to get the sucker at the other end of the line to pay for it. In fact, if we were reasonably clever, we could conduct a “code” game that would eliminate the need for anyone to pay for the call. The devious caller would instruct the operator to say, “I’ve got a collect call for Angelina Jolie, from Brad Pitt; will you accept the charges?” And the person answering the call, who was almost certainly not Ms. Jolie, would say something like, “She’ll be back later” to convey one piece of coded information (e.g., “Yes, I’d love to go to the prom with you,”) or “Sorry, she’s dead!” to convey an entirely different coded message (e.g., “What — you crazy? I wouldn’t be caught dead going to the prom with you!”

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a payphone call to a local number in the U.S. typically cost a dime; for the same price, at least in the 1960s, you could also buy a Coke. This sounds like a good deal, but the Wikipedia article on payphones points out that in vintage-2006 inflation-adjusted terms, a ten-cent call in 1960 would be equivalent to 68 cents; and a ten-cent call in 1970 would be about 28 cents. In any case, the price of a local call typically increased to 20 cents by the early 1980s, and 25 cents by the early 1990s (which, again, would cost significantly more in inflation-adjusted terms). I have no idea what a local call costs today, because I haven’t used a payphone for several years.

Well, that’s not completely true; more precisely, I haven’t used a payphone out on the street for several years. Indeed, throughout the 1980s and 90s, my most common form of payphone usage was in airports, when I needed to contact clients, or check in with my office, while leaving, arriving, or stranded in some connecting airport. Gazillions of other business travelers did the same thing, and while you might occasionally see two or three people waiting for a street-corner payphone to become available, it was much more common to see hordes of people hovering around an inadequate number of airport cell phones.

It also meant that we all became quite adept at memorizing our 14-digit (or whatever they were) “calling card” numbers, so that our long-distance phone calls could be billed directly to our ATT, MCI, Sprint, or whatever account; after all, if you’re making an important phone call to a client on the other side of the country, you’re not going to call collect — nor are you likely to have a pocket full of quarters that you’ll continue feeding into the phone. In addition, the calling-card numbers (which began with a call to a toll-free number, like 1-800-CALL-ATT, and then proceeded to the 10-digit number you wanted to call, followed by the 14-digit calling card number) allowed you to make long-distance calls at a reasonable cost, rather than being ripped off by some fly-by-night telecom that had bribed the local officials into giving them the concession on airport phones. Of course, the same thing was true on the street corners; I still remember making a credit-card call from what looked like an innocent phone on the streets of Washington, DC in the mid-80s, only to discover later on that the sleazeball telecom that operated the phone was charging me $30 for what should have been a $5 call. (And that’s nothing compared to the $1,000 phone bill I managed to ring up during one visit to Spain, with a few short calls back home to New York City … but that’s another story.)

Since payphones may soon be disappearing, I decided it would be interesting to venture forth onto the streets of Manhattan this afternoon, and actually pay attention to the payphone landscape. I half expected they might be gone already; but when I walked up and down Broadway, between 98th Street and 83rd Street this afternoon, I was astounded to count a total of 43 payphones — most of which appeared to be in working order. There were one or two places where you’d have to walk a couple blocks to find a phone; but for the most part, there was one, sometimes two, on each corner. I even took pictures of them all, which you can see here in a Flickr album that I created to celebrate the occasion; you’ll note that a large percentage of them have yellow handsets, the purpose of which I’ve never learned.

Interestingly, only one of the 43 phones was actually being used; but I was amazed that any of them were being used. One of the phone booths was being used as protection against the cold, blustery wind; but most of the phones were silent, empty, and forlorn.

Toward the end of my walk, I noticed a bundled-up fellow stopping in front of the very same phonebooth that I wanted to photograph; and to my amazement, he pulled out a small digital camera, and took a picture of it. Hey! I thought. This was my idea! I get to blog about it first! Then I thought to myself, he’s probably a tourist, from Afghanistan, and wants to show how clean and civilized New York’s public phones are …

I continued walking up the street, and when I got to 98th Street and Broadway, I paused to take a picture of my last payphone … and suddenly noticed that the same bundled-up fellow had appeared right behind me, and had pulled out his camera too. “Ummm,” I said, trying to think how I could best approach this calmly and politely, “are you a tourist? Would you like me to take a picture of you standing beside that payphone?”

“Oh, no,” the man smiled at me, “I’m a phone-washer.”

“A … what?!?”

“I wash phones,” he explained, “and I need the camera to take before-and-after pictures, so my boss will know that I’ve done my job properly.”

“My God,” I exclaimed, “that’s amazing! How many phones do you have to wash? Do you have to do all of Broadway, from Columbus Circle to Columbia University, in a single day?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I have to do 59 in a week.”

“59? Fifty nine blocks?”

“No,” he said. “Just 59 phones.”

I did some quick math in my head …if we imagine this guy is getting $10 an hour for his work (who knows — it could be more, it could be less), that’s $400 in one week, or roughly $6.75 per phone. Jeez … no wonder ATT is losing money on their payphones!

So that’s all I have to say about payphones. However, if you’d like to see pictures of payphones all over the world, click here … and then get yourself a cell phone!

P.S. The lopsided payphone at the beginning of this post is furnished with the kind permission of photographer David H., whose Flickr photos can be seen here.