I spent yesterday roaming Co-Op City. It’s on my radar to possibly move there some time in the not-so-distant future. It is a huge, like a city unto itself, with football fields, swimming pools, shopping centers, and best of all, some dead-and-done Verizon payphones.

I knew of at least two locations ahead of time but I anticipated there would be others, and there were. There was even a working PTS rig at Bartow Mall. I had heard of this one through a reliable source: PTS itself. But it took me a while to get around to checking for it. It is not the only publicly-accessible payphone in the Bronx but the total quantity is in the single digit range.

In other news I’ve developed a fascination with the state of newsstands in New York. It should not be news to me but it was surprising to find that most of them do not sell newspapers or magazines anymore. Those that do look like purveyors of luxury products.

Paper, as someone predicted in the early rise of the Internet, has become a luxury product. It’s a show of your generation and your vintage. Such a luxury that when I tried to find print copies of The New Yorker I searched far and wide before finally landing a copy at Grand Central Terminal.

But back to newsstands, the misnomred hulks that occupy so much sidewalk space — why are so many still there? In particular I see these structures occupied for just a short of period of time in a day, the worker within not even opening the gates or anything but the side door, behind which he sits and vapes.

It seems conspicuous to me, with the size and bulk, that they seem to serve no meaningful use.