No one is using the five pay phones outside the Park Street subway station, at the edge of Boston Common, when a 56-year-old homeless man named Mike checks each for forgotten coins. Though he comes up empty-handed, he is loathe to declare the pay phone dead.
"In the past year," he says, "I've probably gotten $5 and change."
And so the public pay phone limps along, its place as the mainstay of away-from-home dialing usurped by the cellphone. A decade ago there were 2.6 million pay phones in the United States. Today there are only 1 million. Now, more than a century after the pay phone made its debut, AT&T has announced plans to exit the business by the end of the year, just as
Yet pay phones have not outlived their usefulness, particularly for the one quarter of Americans who remain wireless-less, whether by choice or financial necessity.
Then there are special circumstances. A 50-year-old consultant from a western suburb he declines to name finds pay phones handy. "I don't want traceability to my cell," he says. Why? He's a married man calling his girlfriend. Lynn Sweeney of Quincy is on cellphone hiatus. The reason? A $1,240 cellphone bill. So she slips two quarters into a South Station pay phone to tell her husband she's on her way home.
The bank of pay phones beside the Common, not to mention the six four-phone kiosks inside South Station, may constitute an example of supply exceeding demand, but they yield their share of stories. After five months in jail for a probation violation, one of 30-year-old Neil Lang's first acts of freedom is to call a friend from a pay phone before heading home to Connecticut and a future, he says, of "doing the right thing."
NOHEMI GONZALEZ, 40, doesn’t leave her Mattapan home without quarters, phone cards, and her prepaid cellphone, but she tries to limit her use of the latter. ‘‘My minutes’’ — she snaps her fingers — ‘‘just go like that,’’ she says in Spanish. For half an hour she stations herself at a Park Street phone on whose receiver is affixed a sticker from the anarchist collective CrimethInc. that says, ‘‘This phone is tapped . . . courtesy of the US Patriot Act.’’ Gonzalez calls her husband in Ecuador ($5), her sister in Guatemala ($2), and her daughter in Somerville (50 cents).
JEFF AVONDO of Springfield, 48, is frustrated and on his way to visit his niece and ill sister in Halifax. He needs to tell his niece when to pick him up, but her cell is busy and the pay phone won't return his coins. In go more quarters. Now his niece isn't answering, but at least he gets his money back. His train departs South Station soon. "I'm worried I won't get hold of her before I leave," he says. At times like this Avondo wishes he had a cellphone, but he hasn't passed a credit check. His prepaid phone is out of minutes. Finally, he reaches his sister. "Thank God."
JOSE GONZALEZ , a 29-year-old T-shirt vendor from Dorchester, and Joseph Feldman, a 26-year-old student from Cambridge, represent the roughly 7 million American households with no telephone at all - landline or cellular. Several times a day, Gonzalez uses a pay phone at the fringe of the Common, the first time one recent morning being a $1 call to his girlfriend to check on their son's day care arrangements. Feldman, using a $2 phone card purchased at South Station, calls his wife in Peru, and for half an hour they talk about her anticipated move here next month. His card covers 48 minutes of calls to Peru or 100 minutes of local calls. "You can't beat that," he says.
JOANNE HILL, here on business from New Jersey, ordinarily would be multitasking on her mobile as she heads to meetings with money market managers, not standing here, rushed, feeding coins into a pay phone. "I'm between cellphones," she says.
