NYC's Last Payphone Removed As LinkNYC Wifi Kiosks Complete Rollout

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN — Only around 20 years after cell phones took hold in New York, the city marked a milestone on Monday when its last public payphone was hoisted away from a Midtown street corner.

The payphone, on Seventh Avenue near West 49th Street, was the sole survivor of a species that once numbered around 13,000, littering sidewalks around the city. That started to change in 2015, when the city began replacing them with wifi kiosks known as LinkNYC as part of an effort by Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration to reimagine the underused structures.

The ensuing seven years saw the removal of nearly all of the city's remaining payphones. But remnants of that bygone era are not completely lost: while New York's "standard payphones" are now confined to history, four full-length "Superman" phone booths remain standing on the Upper West Side thanks to years of lobbying by Alan Flacks, a neighborhood resident.

The situation was further complicated hours later, when the blog Hell Gate reported that a payphone inside the Union Square subway station remained in place and functional.

"As a native New Yorker, saying goodbye to the last street payphone is bittersweet because of the prominent place they’ve held in the city's physical landscape for decades," said Matthew Fraser, the city's commissioner of the of the Office of Technology and Innovation, in a statement.

"Just like we transitioned from the horse and buggy to the automobile and from the automobile to the airplane, the digital evolution has progressed from payphones to high-speed Wi-Fi kiosks to meet the demands of our rapidly changing daily communications needs."

The Seventh Avenue payphone will now be installed at the Museum of the City of New York, where it will become part of a new exhibition, "Analog City," exploring life in the city before computers.

Meanwhile, LinkNYC continues to evolve: the system's next stage will involve building 32-foot-tall 5G "smart poles" around the city in an effort to improve cell service in underserved areas.

Some in attendance for Monday's removal had less than fond memories of the payphone era.

"Payphones in the outer boroughs were sometimes broken and used for less-than-ideal purposes," said City Councilmember Jennifer Gutierrez, who chairs the Council's technology committee. "It is paramount that we memorialize our payphones by learning from and improving on the ways in which they contributed to issues of equity."