Toronto Gone – where have all the phone booths gone?

Phone booths used to be everywhere in Toronto, but around 15 years or so ago, when cell phones took over, they began to disappear. Rennee Reizman writes in The Atlantic, “At a time when 95 percent of Americans own a mobile phone, the phone booth seems quaint and outdated. People have waxed nostalgic over the loss of this technology in eulogies, public art installations, and documentaries. Since a peak of 2.6 million public pay phones in the mid-1990s, this ubiquitous infrastructure has been on the decline. After the devices stopped turning a profit, AT&T officially announced its exit from the pay phone market in 2007. Verizon followed suit in 2011.”

In the U.S., phone booths were thought to be linked to criminal activity, and were removed. The efforts led to fewer pay phones in impoverished areas, making them inaccessible to their most-likely users. A post on five9.com states “In addition to technological advancements, phone booths have a separate inferiority: they are frequently vandalized. It is not uncommon to see explicit writing in pen or spray paint and the windows practically beg for hooligans to throw rocks. People leaving bars, intoxicated in the middle of the night, are known to use them as restrooms. Even sober pedestrians use them as garbage cans.”

You may remember having to put a dime in the slot and using the rotary dial to dial the number. Later, in the 1980s, as in these photos, the rotary phones were replaced with push button ones. And at some time, the fee went from 10 cents to 25 cents. It was a place to get out of the wind on a winter night, or a place to have a private conversation. I remember getting my first answering machine is the early 1980s and the messages could be accessed remotely from a pay phone with a little beeper. So high tech!

I miss phone booths, but it is good to know that they are being repurposed in certain places. According to five9, “Despite their imminent extinction, telephone booths have proven useful for other purposes. The city of Shanghai, China, has converted 500 former telephone booths into WiFi hotspots. On one hand, this is a positive change because the booth is being used. On the other hand it is somewhat ironic because its new purpose is powering a successor technology. Phone booths are also still useful for advertisers. Just because people no longer enter the booth to make calls, they do pass by. In fact, New York City earns three times as much using its phone booths as ad space than they do using them for their phone services.”

On a recent trip to Japan, I noticed as many phone booths as ever. It means they are still being used, even if just as a space for advertising.

(The title of this post is of course a reference to Pete Seeger’s 1962 folk classic Where Have All the Flowers Gone? – a circular song, that ends where it started, and summarizes the consequences of war.)

The series “Toronto Gone” puts a focus on things that have disappeared–buildings, businesses, parking lots, cars, people that used to be a part of the city in the 1980s and 1990s prior to the condo boom, and before the widespread use of computers and cell phones.

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