Before the mobile phone went from briefcase-sized accessory to attention-draining succubus, there was just one way to contact a friend, colleague, or family member while on the go: the payphone. And nowhere else in the United States were payphones packed as densely as in New York City. By 1960, a million of them had been planted like thickets of human connectivity from Wall Street to Staten Island. But improvements in digital technology and the launch of the 3G network in the late 1990s untethered would-be-callers from payphones. Since then, LinkNYC,…
