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.