It doesn’t take long to become a New Yorker. For some, it’s only a weekend visit, or a couple of months in one of those glass cages high up in the clouds as a summer apprentice.
But the pilgrim goes home with a passport stamp in their memory, a bright snapshot of the city that never sleeps, tucked forever into their hearts.
Hello. I’m calling you this morning to tell you about my youngest daughter’s trip back to New York City for her reunion at Sarah Lawrence College and her beloved theater districts.
She called us from there, with a photo of our old haunts, on her iPhone, of course. Where else?
Breaking News: New York just said goodbye to the last street payphone. Once 6,000 public pay phones stood on dirty street corners or in the rest rooms of swanky hotels. All gone.
Phone booth? How quickly you forget. Remember where Clark Kent changed into his Superman costume? The phone booth, dummy.
Now, that booth and others are in the Museum of the City of New York, part of an “exhibit” about what Manhattan looked like when Superman changed his clothes there, or where Ernie Borgnine said, “Hi, Clara, it’s Marty.”
But those booths are still alive for all of us, in the movies they starred in, along with the actors who used them, Richard Dreyfuss in a rainstorm, calling Marsha Mason in “The Goodbye Girl.” Remember?
They will live forever on Netflix and Amazon Prime in old movies with a terrified Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby.” Phone booths surely must have had their own agents.
For young actors like myself, too broke to have a home phone, they were like traveling one-room apartments with a ready phone to call casting agents, or a girl in the middle of the night after a date, or a breakup with a whispered plea.
“I had a great time.”
“Me too.”
“I just wanted to say … well … I think I love you, you know.”
Those corner cubicles were warm havens on all of the windy, freezing New York days when one could slide in and pretend to be making a call, just to get out of the wind for a few minutes.
The night after I proposed to the girl from Maine, I stopped, at 1 in the morning, at a phone booth and called her.
“I forget,” I said, “Did you really say yes?”
There was a long pause, then she yawned and said …
So on a hot July day in Maine, why should this concern you?
Look around; do you see a street payphone booth down the street in a corner of the soda fountain where you called your girlfriend?
Oh, that’s right, the soda fountain is gone, along with Levine’s Men’s store, Sterns and the Haines.
Remember the phone at the corner of Elm and Western Avenue across from the old “Bee Hive” apartments? Why should you?
Remember the public phone on Main Street in front of Castonguay Park, and another on the corner of Appleton and Main Street, just outside LaVerdiere’s Super Drug Store?
LaVerdiere’s what? Fugidiabout it.
Oh, her answer that night?
“Of course I said yes.”
A pause. “I think I love you, you know.” And I hung up.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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