On Monday, New York City removed its final public payphone (May 23). Payphones were previously a municipal emblem. They were also popular in mainstream cultures, such as Hollywood movies, comic books, TV series, and so forth. They were, however, victimized by modernity and technological improvements like cell phones and free Wi-Fi. When photos of the final payphone, which was located on 7th Avenue, were distributed online, social media users were nostalgic. According to CNBC, the last public pay telephone will be displayed at the Museum of the City of New York.
Notably, local media stated that Manhattan will maintain four of the old-fashioned phone booths on the Upper West Side, located on West End Avenue at the 66th, 90th, 100th, and 101st streets. The last booth containing two Bell System payphones at the junction of 7th Avenue and 50th Street was demolished by Mark Levine, the borough president of Manhattan. Cranes were used to raise the payphones and place them on a flatbed truck.
Levine said on Twitter that he was ‘today gonna bid farewell to the renowned (or infamous?) NYC pay phone. I won’t miss all the dead dial tones, but I did feel a pang of nostalgia when I saw them depart. Truly the end of an era, but perhaps the beginning of a new one with greater justice in access to technology’, Levine elaborated.
When cell phones became more popular in the early 2000s, fixed-line payphones began to lose popularity and began to vanish from New York’s streets. Manhattan began installing hundreds of LinkNYC hotspots, which provide free WiFi and local calls, in 2015. ‘ Just as we transitioned from the horse and buggy to the automobile and from the automobile to the aeroplane, the digital evolution has progressed from payphones to high-speed Wi-Fi kiosks to meet the demands of our rapidly changing daily communications needs,’ said Commissioner Matthew Fraser in the release.
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