Tough Luck, Clark Kent

You want to make a phone call and you don’t want the world listening in. You want some privacy. You want a phone booth. But where to find one?

Sure, there are phones everywhere. Banks of them are set into the walls of hotel lobbies and bank towers. Three-sided stands with steel bars across the phones to prevent theft are anchored outside liquor stores and drugstores.

But there are almost no real phone booths left. They’re gone, and with them went a place where you could step outside the world and have a bit of privacy.

“There were few places in public where you could go and take a deep breath--one of those was a phone booth,” says Robert Thompson, president of the Popular Culture Assn. and professor at Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y. “It was a little oasis.”

At their best, phone booths were snug roomettes of privacy. At their worst, exposed on a city street or in a bus station on the drunken side of downtown, they were signs of another era’s insensitivity and our era’s social unraveling: People in wheelchairs couldn’t get inside. Bums and vagrants turned them into impromptu bathrooms. Those graffiti-marred cubicles could stink to high heaven. If you went in, it was on tiptoes, and you dreaded putting your mouth next to the receiver.

Indeed, it was lack of access that spelled the end for the old-fashioned phone booth, said Ken Scott, owner of Orion Payphones, a San Diego company with 900 pay phones scattered between the Mexican border and the Santa Monica Freeway.

He said pay phones began to bite the dust after the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990.

“What they did initially was to take the doors off, then they lowered the phones,” said Scott, making phones accessible to people in wheelchairs. “That was a kind of stopgap thing.”

Today, what constitutes an “enclosure” in industry parlance, doesn’t really enclose anything but offers a sturdy metal shell, not to protect phone users, but to protect the phones, said Scott, “from a guy swinging a sledgehammer.”

In the old days, calling from a phone booth was almost like dialing from home. You could say what you wanted. No one was listening in. And that was important. Not so nowadays, it seems.

Instead of phone booths, we have cellular phones. And everyone is on stage.

“With some of the convenience and acceleration of the late 20th century and early 21st century, America has had the price to pay of not only a lack of privacy, but of decorum,” Thompson says. “You have these people who are sitting in a lounge on the phone, talking awfully loud and clearly enjoying the fact that everyone around them is hearing them having this important conversation.”

With the phone booth, it was different. The first ones appeared around 1878, even before pay phones were invented. You paid an attendant after making the call.

Thomas Watson, assistant to Alexander Graham Bell, built a phone booth in 1883 that came with a domed top and ventilator, screened windows, a desk with pen and ink.

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By the turn of the century, hundreds of companies were building phone booths. Some were elegant, carpeted, made of fine woods. The Yesbera Manufacturing Co. of Toledo, Ohio, sold single-walled booths for $17.50 and double-walled booths for $23.75. Today a rare, custom-made wooden phone booth from EPS Telephone Booths in Eugene, Ore., costs $2,995.

The old phone booths were solid, imposing. Insulation was especially important, given the poor quality of phone connections in those early days. Booths served a dual purpose. They gave callers a welcome privacy and muffled the yelling often necessary during a phone call.

In 1905, the Bell System put its first outdoor coin telephone on a Cincinnati street. Few opted for the convenience: Who would think of making a private call on a public street? Imagine what one of those turn-of-the-century souls would make of the downtown scene today.

The 20th century began with land lines, with phone booths where you could talk in private. It ends with millions of cell phones, no phone booths, no public place for a private call and no hope of returning to the old days.

“It used to be that a phone booth provided you privacy by blocking you off from other people around you,” Thompson says. “Now, I feel we need phone booths for blocking those people off from us.”