Pay Phone Landscape

Ahhhh the payphone. Nowadays when my car is filled with bees I can use my cell phone to call someone to get me out of the potentially harmful situation. However this was obviously not always the case. In 1960 Bell Systems installed its 1 millionth pay phone. Pay phones could be found everywhere in a plethora of styles and convenient settings. There were drive up pay phones, payphones at almost every grocery store, community center, and gathering place. There were even some payphones set up in the desert. See the Mojave Pay Phone. But these days if I am stuck without a cell phone then chances are I will be unable to find a payphone, or at the very least a working pay phone. The cultural and physical landscape was altered by the pay phone. It changed the way business around the world was done and prior to outdoor phone booths the pay phone was one of the focal points of most small and large towns. Airport terminals, subways, and bus depots were absolutely filled with phone banks and people clamoring to use them. The easiest place to see a payphone in this day and age might be at your local prison, but even these only accept outgoing collect calls.

I suppose I could always wait for whichever awesome person rides this mobile pay phone bike but lets face it. Who has that much time to spare when your car is inexplicably filled with bees?
The payphone had a fairly long and interesting history. As the story goes William Gray was frantically searching around his town for a phone so he could make a call to his sick and possibly dying wife. He was finally able to convince the owner of a local store to let him use his phone. After this Gray along with an inventor friend came up with a way to ensure that anyone in need would be able to find a phone. and over 100 years later payphones are still in existence. Although that existence is quickly dwindling. My first gut reaction to this loss of the payphone is a simple "who cares" attitude. But this reaction is unfounded and leaves out alot of possibilities. There are alot of people who still depend on the payphone to make and receive calls, to make appointments, and as an alternative to overly expensive cellphone charges. Not to mention that homeless people most certainly make use of payphones if they can.

The landscape of America was at one time changed by the addition of at one point over 2.5 million payphones and booths. Even National Parks were inundated with the technology. In one park reportedly moose kept knocking into the glass booths because they thought the reflections were other moose threatening their territory. In the same way that the addition affected the landscape, with wires and clearings made for phones, so too does their elimination. www.payphoneproject.com documents the loss of these pieces of American history and describes the changes in the environments around which they were situated. Generally all that is left in the place of an uprooted phone booth is 4 rods of twisted metal or if the phone still remains it is typically in defunct condition.

The other thing to consider when dealing with the history of payphones when dealing in terms of landscape is the amount of land that must have been cleared in order to make way for the lines to be put in. It seems like an important side note to me. To think that all of that clearing is just to make way for all of these systems to be put in a landfill feels like an enormous waste of money and energy.
 

second history

The term "Second History" leads me to feel several different things, especially since my move to buffalo almost 5 years ago.  The first thing i think is the inherent inability of the term to encompass the true feeling that one receives upon looking at the years of cultural facade upon the streets of the city and its neighboring suburbs. Truly these places have undergone a change in history that far outreaches a second, third, or even fourth history. Obviously a feeling like this would be much more predominant in the European countryside, where it seems things don't change for centuries, but the feeling is somehow much more eerie in the context of the American Landscape. I am constantly reminded that the objects, buildings, centers of commerce of America were once wholly and completely different. The change that occurs can happen in matters of decades, sometimes even only one. The other thing that strikes me is that although everywhere we look we can see a vast kaleidoscopic mixture of old and new edifices one often forgets that inside each of these buildings a different story is to be told, either by those that built it, lived there, or even those that still bear witness as to what it was like in the 'good ol days". Having been confined to the internet for the last week or so, vs. actually being able to go into the real world, i came across numerous images and stories of the way that Buffalo and its surviving neighborhoods used to be. The stories tell a rather sad and depressing tale, one which is not distinctly Buffalonian in context but seems these days to be a part of an American tale. The once burgeoning storefronts with bright glittering marquees and the glitz and glamor of hope seem to have left Buffalo and most major cities of the Rust Belt behind. If one thinks it disheartening to think back upon the changes of say, a 20 year period, then one can only imagine being able to look back 50 years or more. One story that was attached to some images I found was that of a haberdasher in East Buffalo who started his business 20 years ago in what was a promising neighborhood. Recently he was woken up to the cops telling him they had arrested a man with an uzi on his front steps. I wonder if the man was simply admiring the brick facade or investigating the post war building structure. Probably not. For more information on this see http://buffalostoryproject.com/2010/04/17/rise-and-ruin/. However I digress, I guess the real questions that I have are ones that concern American existence and the structures we build. Is our declining Urban structure a symptom of a throwaway society, a "screw it, we'll just build and new one" mentality? In contrast to Europe where castles and cities are centuries old, are we incapable of creating things that last more than a 75 year time-span, or even more so are we able to preserve them as links to the past?