advertisement

Constable: Is this the last pay phone in suburbs?

A generation ago, you could spot these things all across the suburbs. In the 1970s, it seemed as if their population was growing. Then everything changed. I couldn't remember the last time I had seen one. I don't know if my kids have ever seen one, except in movies.

So when veteran Daily Herald sports columnist Mike Imrem lets me know that he's spotted one outside the Teavana at the upscale Deer Park Town Center shopping mall, I rush over to catch a glimpse before it disappears.

"Oh, my God! It's a pay phone!" says Madison Rorer, a manager at Teavana, as she mimics the discovery cry of me and others who marvel at the working pay phone right outside the tea shop's door.

Encased in an elegant black metal frame, the pay phone works just fine.

"I've been here three years and I've seen one person use that phone," says Meg, a fellow manager at the Teavana store. And even that didn't go smoothly.

"He had to come in and ask how to use it," says Meg, who declines to give her full name. Although she's 21 and never used a pay phone, she intuitively gave good advice about using one.

"You pay and then you phone," she told the guy, who apparently did figure it out. Although that is the only patron Meg has seen make a phone call, that doesn't mean the phone isn't popular.

"People take selfies with it," says Rorer, who is 22 and understands the fascination with the technology from the last century as she scans the Starbucks app on a cellphone to make a sale. "They do it all the time. It's definitely unusual."

And that's the point.

"It's used more as a novelty," says Lisa Blaszinski, general manager of the shopping center, who notes that the pay phone was part of the complex when it opened in 2000. "It's nostalgic. It's just a fun memory while people are here at the center."

The pay phone is endangered but not extinct.

"We still have a little under 100 pay phones, most at gas stations," says Marty Therrien, co-founder of Express Telephone Systems in Schaumburg, which owns and maintains the pay phone at Deer Park Town Center and used to have more than 800 pay phones in the city and suburbs. "We wouldn't leave that phone there if people didn't use it. People still drop quarters in it. There are people who need them."

But not like in the past. Clark Kent used to need a pay phone booth in which to change into Superman. Actress Tippy Hedron needed a phone booth to provide shelter from winged attackers in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 movie, "The Birds."

In the 2004 movie "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy," a distraught Will Ferrell called from a phone booth and screamed, "I'm in a glass case of emotion!" In "Dirty Harry," Clint Eastwood raced from pay phone to pay phone to get clues from a serial killer named Scorpio. So do Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson in "Die Hard: With a Vengeance."

Secret agent Maxwell Smart used phone booths to gain entrance to his secret organization, and Harry Potter used one to go to the Ministry of Magic. The title characters from "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" and "Dr. Who" used a phone booth to travel through time.

In the age before cellphones, pay phones used to be highly regarded objects. I'd call the pay phone at Wrigley Field on some days just to get the score. Pay phones were what reporters used to call in breaking news to an editor. National Public Radio did a fine story on a now-gone phone booth in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Pay phones were what drug dealers and pimps used to sell their wares. Even after the invention of Caller I.D., pay phones were a way to make an anonymous phone call. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when cellphones were overwhelmed, pay phones still worked, Therrien notes, adding that officials can pinpoint a 9-1-1 call from a pay phone, which doesn't always happen with a cellphone.

Frontier Communications has cut the number of local pay phones in half in the past five years. "We have 263 Frontier-owned pay phones left throughout the state of Illinois. In 2012, we had 553," says Christy Reap, assistant vice president of corporate communications. "We keep some pay phones in at the request of commercial customers. Some are busier than others, of course."

When it left the pay phone business at the end of 2008, AT&T noted that the market had plunged from 2.6 million phones in 1998 to about a million, The Federal Communications Commission just updated its "Tips for Using Public Phones and Payphones" in June, warning consumers to check prices, which can be "surprisingly high," before they make a call.

The communications landscape continues to evolve. As long as pay phones are simply endangered and not extinct, you can still find a few throughout the suburbs.

"The difficult part is you can't get the parts anymore," Therrien says, explaining that while no one makes new parts for a 20th-century pay phone, there are plenty of discontinued devices to cannibalize for parts. "We have a boneyard in the back of our office."

  This pay phone in the Deer Park Town Center shopping mall might look like a museum piece, but it still works. Burt Constable/ bconstable@dailyherald.com
  The days of a dime phone call are over, but you can make a local phone call for 50 cents from this pay phone next to Teavana at the upscale Deer Park Town Center shopping mall. You can make a 10-minute long-distance call for a dollar. Burt Constable/bconstable@dailyherald.com
  Aside from the remnants of a recent visit by a bird, the pay phone next to Teavana in the upscale Deer Park Town Center shopping mall is graffiti-free. A pay phone is such a rare sight in the suburbs that people take selfies pretending to use this one, but it is used and still makes money. Burt Constable/bconstable@dailyherald.com
Article Comments
Guidelines: Keep it civil and on topic; no profanity, vulgarity, slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about tragedies will be blocked. If a comment violates these standards or our terms of service, click the "flag" link in the lower-right corner of the comment box. To find our more, read our FAQ.