The Disappearing Phone Booth
In the film thriller “Phone Booth,” actor Colin Farrell is pinned down by a sniper in Manhattan’s last phone booth. If he hangs up, he dies. For an hour or so, they play cat and mouse. It’s essentially a one-man performance: Farrell begs, curses, and tries to talk his way out of it. The beads of sweat never leave his forehead; his dark, thick brows are locked at 45 degrees of anxiety.
But this movie has another, improbable star – and that’s the phone booth itself. There’s a palpable pleasure in seeing one on the screen. After all, when was the last time you saw one or used one to make a call?
They’re practically extinct. In the cannibalistic world of personal communications, small phones eat big phones. The old phone that came with its own little building around it was replaced by the stripped-down, pedestal model, which is in the process of being gobbled up by a phone that fits in your pocket.
“Phone Booth, 3 a.m., Rahway, N.J.” by George Tice.
You still see the old booths around — there are some along the Garden State Parkway, for example. But the urban variety has mostly disappeared. They were done in, not just by the cellphone, but by their vulnerability to vandalism and theft. Drug dealers did business in them. Homeless people spent the night or used them as bathrooms. One by one, they were torn down.
The resurrected one in “Phone Booth” seems to exert a retro pull on the whole film. The midtown it conjures up, with its flamboyant hookers and baseball-bat-wielding pimp, feels like a pre-Giuliani, pre-“Lion King” New York, a Sodom in the hands of an angry god.
The booth is essential to the character’s isolation and entrapment. While everybody else cruises freely about with cellphones lightly pressed to their ears, he is tethered by a steel-wrapped cord, confined by glass-and-metal walls, and forced to confess his sins.
Film noir plays well in phone booths. Everyone remembers a scene like this: A desperate person bursts into a booth. The caller pumps in the coins —ka-ching, ka-ching —and fiercely dials —zum-zum-zum-zum-zum-zum-zum —and we can hear the tiny b-ring, b-ring, b-ring, while the suspense builds, and maybe there’s no answer or the wrong person answers, confirming some terrible suspicion, and the caller slams the receiver onto the metal hook – bang!
The phone booth was always more than street furniture. On a busy city street, it could be a sanctuary; at night, an illuminated stage. It conjured a mood. George Tice, the poet-photographer of Fifties-style New Jersey, tapped into it with his 3 a.m. portrait of an empty booth, a lonely beacon, leaning back into the weeds on some godforsaken Rahway strip.
We miss those booths. Where does poor Clark Kent change nowadays? And what about those college students who used to pack themselves in – up to 25 at a time? They have to make do with Volkswagens. The phone booth is a piece of Americana, like the diner or the automobile.
Which came first, the pay phone or the booth? According to an AT&T Web site, it was the booth. Originally, people would enter booths – say, in a hotel lobby – where an attendant would connect their call and note the time. Then he would lock them in, so they couldn’t leave without paying. The first outdoor coin-operated phone booth was installed on a Cincinnati street in 1905. But it didn’t catch on right away. “People,” according to the site, “were reluctant to make private calls on a public thoroughfare.”
Try to imagine such delicacy of feeling the next time you’re on a crowded elevator and someone starts barking into his cellphone.
Early outdoor booths were made of wood and had floors. In the 1950s, the glass-and-aluminum booth introduced modern transparency and did away with the floors. The phones continued to change—the single slot coin drop, the push button dialing— but that was the end of booth design—except for theme features like the cable-car look in San Francisco and the pagoda roofs in New York’s Chinatown.
Indoor booths, some of them quite elegant, have managed to cling to existence in some of the older hotels in New York and in other public places. The New York Stock Exchange, proud of its pioneering use of the telephone, maintains its old booths.
A handsome quartet of oak booths are fully operable on the ground floor of the New York Public Library. Unlike booths elsewhere in the library, these still have their bifold doors. Slipping into one is like getting behind the wheel of a vintage car. The inside is wood, solid on three sides. The door snaps shut with a springy squeak. Amazingly, a light goes on overhead. And there’s … a seat. It’s wood, not upholstered, but a seat nonetheless, an amenity so sensible you can’t believe that some authority hasn’t ripped it out. Beneath the phone is a shelf, for change, pen, address book. There are louvers up top for air circulation, and something more — a metal box with a toggle switch. You flick it on, and, against all odds, it starts whirring away. Your own personal exhaust fan.
It’s hard not to feel spoiled by all this. Even a bit unworthy. In the modern world, phones are appendages for narrating trips to the supermarket, calls are measured in thousands of weekend and “anytime” minutes. But architecture can be ennobling, and in this wonderful relic, every word seems to matter.
World by Design Column
2003
