Connected: Installing the Future of New York

Public connectivity is not new. Pay phones were a feature of the urban landscape for almost a century.

But now, like old railroad lines and manufacturing lofts, they are being repurposed to serve a more contemporary need. JL


Ian Frazier reports in The New Yorker:

By 2020, the 8,178 curbside pay phones in the city will be transformed into Links. Its sides light up with ads are the revenue producers for the city as well as for Google and other investors that run Links. A keypad allow passersby to call anyplace in the U.S. for free. A touch screen gives access to a Web browser. Below is a USB port for charging devices, and headphones. The Link offers free Wi-Fi that’s a hundred times faster than the usual Wi-Fi.

The future is at Third Avenue and Fifteenth Street, and moving north. On December 28th, at the intersection’s southeast corner, workers installed a new public telephone called a Link. It is the first of its kind anywhere in the city, the country, or the world. By 2020, more than half of the 8,178 curbside pay phones in the city will be transformed into Links. When the Link went in at Fifteenth Street, a technician tried it out by calling the cell phone of the worker standing next to him. When the cell phone rang, the technician’s first words were not “Mr. Watson, come here. I need you.” On that same day, the crew put in a second Link, at Seventeenth and Third. Since then, the Links have been marching up the avenue. When they get to Third Avenue and Fifty-seventh, they will pause, only to start appearing on other streets. Eventually, there will be about seventy-five hundred Links throughout the city, and all the curbside pay phones (except for four of them) will be gone.

The Link stands nine feet six inches tall—a little higher than the average “Don’t Walk” sign. It is made mostly of shiny, extra-tough aluminum, has the shape of a hockey-stick blade, and gleams like a futuristic monolith that primitive humans might worship in a movie. Perpendicular to passing traffic, its sides will light up with advertisements, about four feet high by three feet wide, that change every fifteen seconds. The ads are the revenue producers, minting money for the city as well as for Google and the other investors in the consortium that owns Intersection, the company that runs the Links.

The ads also subsidize the service. The Link’s narrow edges are about a foot across. On the edge handy to the sidewalk, a keypad like the one on your basic pay phone will allow passersby to call anyplace in the U.S. for free. There’s no receiver; you talk and listen at a little speaker, like an apartment intercom. Above the keypad, a touch screen in a vertical configuration will give the user access to a Web browser. Below the keypad is a USB port for charging devices, and another port where you can plug in headphones. Mainly, the Link offers free Wi-Fi that’s a hundred times faster than the usual public Wi-Fi. The Links will bring high-speed Internet access to most of the city.

Scott Goldsmith, the president of media at Intersection, is a slim, intense native New Yorker, graying at the temples, who admires the Link passionately: “It will completely change how people interact with the city. People will love it!” He also knows a lot about old pay phones. Recently, he led a mini-tour of some of the city’s notable pay phones, in a spirit of hail-and-farewell. The tour group consisted of a fellow pay-phone fancier and Intersection’s publicist. They started at a kiosk phone on Fulton Street in Brooklyn near the phone where, years ago, Goldsmith learned that he’d got into law school. From there, he took them to a much photographed phone on Vesey Street, in downtown Manhattan, where hundreds of people made calls on September 11th. Eventually, the tour ended at a phone booth at the corner of 101st Street and West End Avenue.

“This is what I really wanted us to see,” Goldsmith said. “This is the classic old phone booth, one of only four like it in the city. All four of these phone booths are on West End Avenue, and all are what we call the Superman phone booth—the kind that Clark Kent used to go into and change into Superman. We plan to keep all of these phone booths. Even after all the Links are in, and all today’s pay phones are gone, this phone booth and the other three Superman booths will still be on their corners. We will fix them up, put the hinged doors back on them, maybe get the fans in the ceiling to work again, and maintain the booths carefully, as a nod to the wonderful history of the pay phone. Plus, they’ll be like the Links, in that all calls made from them will be free.”

“But then they won’t be pay phones,” the pay-phone fancier said.

“Hmm . . . I hadn’t thought of that,” Goldsmith said. “O.K., we’ll make it so they still cost a quarter. That way we’ll maintain historical accuracy.”

Later, the pay-phone fancier walked down West End by himself and checked out the other Superman booths—at 100th, Ninetieth, and Sixty-sixth Streets. By design, the Link has no flat surfaces on which you can leave, say, an almost-empty Pabst bottle in a wrinkled paper bag. These Superman booths still have the little shelf beside the phone and always will. Their small privacy will still vibrate, occasionally, with the old lonesome pay-phone emotions of our former lives. The Links, savvier about human entanglements, will not. ♦