Phone Booths USA (& Canada too!)

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About Phone Booths USA (& Canada too!)

Phone booths. Not the fake "phone on a stick" ones or even the "phone in an egg" ones, but real booths... you know, a box that you stand in with a pay phone inside it. This should explain it:



A disappearing breed, the standard phone booth has been quietly vanishing across the land, mostly without us really noticing. This group is to preserve photographs of something that we once took for granted, something that seemed like it was on every street corner, at every gas station, store and restaurant. Look around, and you'll see what we mean. Now look harder, find one, and share it here.

Guidelines:

• Has to be a booth as described above.
• Can be of any vintage, wooden, aluminum, red, blue, whatever.
• It can be free standing, or the kind that were built into banks of booths, like in train stations, hospitals, offices, airports, etc. (Just as long as it's a full booth)
• Can have or not have a working phone in it (or no phone at all).
• Can be featured on a postcard, advertisement or other print media, just as long as the phone booth is prominently displayed.
• Has to be located in the USA. (If it's a foreign phone box in the USA, it's ok here.) US Territories are included. Well, ok... Canadian phone booths are allowed too.
• Bonus points if it's got a telephone company sign on the top.*
• Extra bonus points for odd or extremely remote locations.*

Tell us the location of your booth as best you can. (Not mandatory, but nice in case others want to go look at it too.

Also OK here:

• Close-ups of the phone within the booth, signage or phone company decals/stickers on the booth itself.
• Vintage phone booth related advertising (Bell or otherwise).
• Vintage phone booth related postcards.

( *Bonus point amounts over 1,000,000 are redeemable for one free local call at a phone booth of your choice. Travel & lodging not included.)

Phone booth history:

The classic steel/aluminum phone booth that we all remember was invented and manufactured by Benner-Nawman. In 1948, the Pacific Telephone Company had their corporate headquarters in San Francisco. They called Rollie Nawman and asked him to design and produce a telephone booth made of aluminum and glass to replace the wooden phone booths that they had in service at the time. With Pacific Telephone’s adoption of the very first design the company began making thousands of telephone booths and enclosures used by every major Telephone Company here in the United States and in 45 other countries; many of those enclosures are still in use today. With the advent of the cell phone, payphones were on the decline, and with them, the phone booth itself. In 2005, Benner-Nawman sold off all remaining stock and got out of the phone booth business. Myrmidon-PBG bought most of B-N's stock, presumably for servicing old booths.

Please help us grow!

If you see a photo you think should be in this group, simply cut-n-paste this into a comment box to invite the photo:
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Please add this to the "<a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/phonebooths/">Phone Booths USA</a>" group.
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