Tag Archives: urban
Travel
I also recently took a trip home to Brisbane for the first time since the pandemic. I’m sure Australia is well represented already on the blog but there’s always room for more. The Heathrow box was actually an advertising screen.
Portugal
On a recent trip to the north of Portugal I was surprised to see so many UK styled boxes in use.
London Postal Museum
During the week we took an underground walk along the Mail Rail at Mount Pleasant. No longer in operation, the rail operated for 75 years up to 2003. Here’s a shot of the garden by the shop:
And here are a few from the tour:
Chilly right now
There is an Arctic breeze blowing across the UK right now. Here is a phonebox in Edinburgh that sets the tone. Thanks to Corinn for sharing this.
Lisbon, Portugal
I had a long weekend in Lisbon a couple of months ago and came across enough phones to keep me happy.
The airport phone didn’t quite match the technology offered at Denver though…
USA holiday
I recently went to Colorado, Utah and Wyoming for a couple of weeks holiday. I noticed that there are not a lot of phone boxes around. In Denver, the only one in the street I came across was an iconic British red box – outside a British pub of course. Inside was something even closer to my heat – a phone box full of whisky!
Molly Brown’s house had a phone, which in 1910 would have been rare, but it seems that was a replica. There were, unexpectedly, phone boxes inside the Denver Capitol building, although I don’t know if they still work. Apart from the airport, which appear to be next generation what with having screens attached, the only other phone we came across was ouside the Blanding visitor centre.
The box in the arts
Some recent sights
New York City removes the last payphone from service
I have just read some saddening news. Not sad on the grand scale of what’s happening in the world at the moment but sad in that it brings to an end a long tradition in which I have an interesst. The following is cross-post from the CNBC website on 23rd May 2022:
It’s the end of an era: New York City removed its last public payphone on Monday.
The boxy enclosures were once an iconic symbol across the city. But the rise of cellphones made the booths obsolete.
The effort to replace public pay telephones across the city kicked off in 2014 when the de Blasio administration solicited proposals to reimagine the offering, the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation said in a news release.
Officials selected CityBridge to develop and operate LinkNYC kiosks, which offer services such as free phone calls, Wi-Fi and device charging. The city began removing street payphones in 2015 to replace them with the LinkNYC kiosks.
There are nearly 2,000 kiosks across the city, according to a map from LinkNYC.
“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,” Commissioner Matthew Fraser said in the release.
The last public pay telephone will be displayed at the Museum of the City of New York as part of an exhibit looking back at life in the city before computers.
