Certain aspects of the job remain irresistible to me, but I am losing money at it with its barely-livable wages and time-commitment.Īnd WordPress! Even the mighty WordPress with its bloated slowness and idiosyncratic irritants - the content management system itself makes my head feel heavy and my heart unenthusiastic. The full-time job referenced earlier in this piece has also played its part in making this once-loved project of mine feel like an albatross.
I used to make my entire living off this and a few other websites. By modern standards that makes me “low quality.” I’d be OK with that if it didn’t deny me an income. It’s true, I don’t play click-bait games, I don’t chase keywords, I don’t trick anyone into being here. How can one burn out on something they still love?īut after an influential-seeming advertising entity described this content as “low quality” I all but gave up. But when it comes to this website I’ve had no heart in it for a long time. I still scout out payphones and share findings on social media. Find more at my YouTube Channel, reachable via flaneur.nyc. Here is one other of several videos I made recently from 77 Water. This is like finding an atom in the solar system. I’ve taken so many photos of payphones (and other things, of course) that finding something like that makes the needle-in-the-haystack analogy sound quaint. Mine eyes used to see but no longer do, unless she somehow got erased.įinding photos I captured of PRAY on these phones at 77 Water feels like diving into an ocean from the bottom, feeling its weight before having a chance to simply swim. Like so many things in life PRAY can be like that: Right in front of your face but visible only to those with eyes to see.
If that etching is or was really there I cannot find it now. My sightings of PRAY had mostly been on other parts of the payphones and their enclosures. It was even on one of the coin boxes, said to have been the choice surface of New York City’s payphones where the legendary PRAY did her work. What has become of PRAY on these phones? I swear that with my own two eyes I saw, within the last few years, a single instance of the signature scratchiti on one of these phones. Its nooks and crannies (I prefer to call them crooks and nannies) serve to securely affix my Payphone Radio cards until a curious passer-by scoops one of them up, or the janitor seen in this video does his job and disposes of them. Its battered handsets move with the winds. Surprising as it may be that they’re not quite gone yet, payphones are still technically a market in decline, and in many locales, it’s increasingly hard to find one.This structure of stubborn obsolescence is right at home, itself a work of art, positioned between two other public art pieces outside 77 Water Street. Michael Zumbo, president of telecommunications firm PTS, mentioned to the Los Angeles Times that, were a natural disaster or a terrorist attack to knock out cell towers, payphones would still to work, necessitating their continued existence. In the event of a dead phone battery or an area without reliable cell coverage, payphones remain a reliable alternative. Many who are homeless also still rely upon the payphone when they need to get in touch with people far away.Īnother reason why payphones still exist could be that they are also quite useful in emergency scenarios. That’s about one in every 20 individuals, or close to 16 million people. Approximately 5 percent of Americans still do not own cell phones. The dwindling number of payphones undoubtedly hits these types of communities the hardest. “If someone wants to call home, say, to El Salvador,” he explained, “it can actually be less expensive for them to use a public payphone than a cell phone.” Mason Harris, president of Robin Technologies, a former Washington, D.C., payphone company, told Citylab that certain areas -specifically lower-income immigrant communities - still find payphones quite useful for making affordable, long-distance calls.
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