You remember my fascination with rogue payphones, right? They were always a tantalizing mystery to me. They appear at random in parking lots and on sides of buildings, then they disappear. I felt nervous using them, since they are unregulated and you have no way to know who might be listening in or skimming pin numbers or passcodes. Well, I have identified the culprit behind these rogue phones. This is strictly confidential.

What happened was, yesterday I walked past an abandoned store on Woodside Avenue. From what must have been a couple of hundred feet away I saw a freshly installed payphone. It was in a clamshell enclosure that had been empty for years. All I could say upon seeing this was “WHAT?” I spent half an hour in amazement that someone installed a payphone here in this year of 2016. Sure enough it worked, though my quarters got jammed and I was never able to make a coin call. This is a classic rogue payphone, complete with there being zero contact information about who owns it and no rate information concerning long distance calls paid for with credit cards.

So I am altogether mystified by all this. Whoever set this up did so either illegally or without permission, But how did they get a dial tone? You typically have to go through Verizon for that but they would want nothing to do with this. I have and have always had a lot of questions about how this rogue payphone thing works.

So today I happened to encounter one of John’s payphones at a shopping center in Jackson Heights. Not only did I see it but someone happened to be using it when I first noticed it. Nice… This made me think, Why don’t I ask John how this rogue payphone thing works? I’ve asked him about these things before but never got a straight answer. Maybe he doesn’t know and maybe he doesn’t care but I hadn’t heard from in a while, soooooo…

His response was swift. He basically said “Asshole, that’s my phone outside the Sports Authority.” I mean, he was actually nice about it. He didn’t say “Asshole” but he might as well have. Then he revealed that a rogue payphone in Greenpoint that I asked him about a couple of years ago was also his. It was illegal but it did three or four dollars a day so he kept it out as long as he could. In short, it appears John has been the culprit behind every rogue payphone I’ve ever seen in New York. I’ve asked him about these phones a handful of times over the years but never got a straight answer until now. These phones run on rechargable batteries powered by solar panels on top. The connection is wireless. I’m not sure how the dial tone effect is done but I guess it’s just an audio loop.

Now I know, now you know 🙂 -mt