Payphone Project

[Shirley_Ujest]

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The Relating Article

The Gist:

It started as an art project. Blue spiral notebook in hand, Mark Thomas spent afternoons walking the streets of Manhattan, compiling the numbers and locations of public pay phones. He posted them on his Web site in the hope that people would call them.
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“There is real beauty in whimsical acts of contact between strangers,” he explained.
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Soon his list expanded to include public phones at the top of the Eiffel Tower, in the basement of the Vatican, in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and at about 450,000 other places around the world.
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Word of his project spread, and Cindy in Hawaii reported having had the strangest conversation about beaches with a man answering a pay phone in Brazil. Kim from Sydney, said she called a booth on the corner of 57th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, where some guy answered “Wassup” and said he had never heard of Australia.
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Most surreal of all was the conversation Thomas had when he picked up a pay phone in the New York City borough of Queens, at the 36th Avenue stop of the N subway line, and the person on the other end explained that he had found the number on Thomas’s Web site.

The numbers database page

Looks like fun.

[Shirley_Ujest]

Payphone-directory is another one.

[Abbie_Carmichael]

So who’s going to call first?

I have a Sam’s prepaid phone card with a ton of minutes on it. A call to Australia wouldn’t put too big of a dent in it

[Shirley_Ujest]

On one of the two dirctories listed, there is a number for the payphone on Pitcairn Island.

It is a very expensive call, they warn, to make.

Since there are about 43 people living on that island, I think it would be really neato.

You go first, abby