A Relic, If You Can Keep It
After more than 140 years, public payphones still exist. An ongoing exploration into a disappearing technology.
I dialed the number, and she sang that terrible tune... "Doo doo dooit. Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please hang up and try again." And try again I would. Long ago those words instilled fear into my dwindling pocket change and the need to get a ride home. But this time, those words indicated I may have finally found the northernmost operating payphone in Michigan.
It was the last day of 2021, and I was hoping to ring out the old year by ringing a friend back home in Hamtramck from my objet de vertu. In and out of meager mobile data range, I had a map that showed plenty of payphones to find, but had already found defunct phones blending into the scenery of a picked through continental breakfast, and wireless but not in the mobile way.
There are 373 payphones left in Michigan in addition to the one I sought, but when 97% of USians own a cellphone according to the Pew Research Center , and at least three major providers claim to cover over 99% of Michigan with at least 4G data, why are there any at all? Let's get a map and see what we can find.
It started with a tweet
Matt Miller on Twitter: "Pay phones of the Upper Peninsula series. 1/138" ( link to tweet )
A truly modern feat: a phone used to take a picture of a phone and publishing from the phone to the internet accessed on my phone. Matt Miller, an executive producer at Fox47 in Lansing, Michigan, tweeted in August of 2021, a photograph of a payphone in the Upper Pensinsula. Replying to Miller, MLive reporter Taylor DesOrmeau mentioned that the Michigan Public Service Commission maintains a list of payphones in operation in Michigan. This is why I follow Michigan journalist twitter.
Eager for a treasure map to lead me on an adventure into a technology I've fully transitioned out of using, I was disappointed when my inquiry was returned with the news that it would require technology I had not transitioned into using—a map created from FOIA'd data. Interest piqued, I yet relinquished payphones to history.
Fast forward two months from the August tweet to October 15th, I learned in orientation at my new job as Data Design Specialist at Data Driven Detroit that I would get weekly professional development time. What better way to equip myself for the future than to learn how to map locations of a technology of the past. We got a spreadsheet from the Michigan Public Service Commission of payphone locations, and after the struggles of normalizing data and geocoding locations many, many times, I finally had a map. And now to find my treasure.
Journey to find the northernmost payphone in Michigan
With the payphone map in my mobile phone, and a week in the Keweenaw peninsula, I decided to see if I could locate and use the northernmost payphone in Michigan. It was my first time in the Keweenaw, and after navigating to various hikes and cross-country skis at the end of December with no data connection, it became apparent why a payphone could still find some use.
Historical Interlude
The first coin-operated public payphone was located in a bank in Hartford, Connecticut, and was installed there by William Gray in 1889. According to Atlas Obscura , "Gray originally came up with the idea of a coin-operated public payphone after he needed to call a doctor when his wife fell ill." Before then—and much like today—personal phone access required a monthly subscription. It's also been speculated that failed painter and known bigot Samuel Morse shifted his efforts to perfecting the single-wire telegraph after grieving the death of his wife after childbirth, having received notification a few states away of her illness too late to be by her bedside.
My first mobile phone from 2007, a Motorola C139
The last discrete memory I have of using a payphone was to call for a ride home in the late 90s from the lobby of my middle school. (1990s. Though indebted to William Gray's innovation, I was not one of the original users.) Since I was in middle school at the time, it wasn't to return to my sick wife, just that track practice had ended and home at the northern edge of the Detroit suburbs was half-day's journey by horse away. In lieu of quarters, I instead changed my name from "Sean" on the collect call to "Hey-mom-don't-accept-the-call-practice-is-over-pick-me-up-bye."
I didn't concede to the era of mobile phones until 2007, and though this perfectly sized phone was mobile, it was on Cingular's pay-as-you-go plan—a bridge between paradigms of stationary coin-operated payphones and the mobile phone subscription services we today... and that other people did use in 2007. Some of us were late adopters to early adopting.
With a mobile phone I was protected from being stranded without a means to call, but payphones have a different history. According to The Morning Call , payphone population peaked in the United States at 2.6 million phones in 1995. We started stranding payphones in the 1990s era of tough-on-criminals instead of tough on the causes of crime. With our penchant for taking something created for common good and assuming the people who need it most are only using it for criminal activity, Renée Reizman explains in this fascinating The Atlantic article , that politicians started lobbying for payphones to be restricted, banned, and removed, while also implementing loitering laws with the thinking payphones were "lightening rods for crime." As mobile phones became prominent and payphones held less economic potential for providers, they became stranded assets .
According to Ashley Warner, a representative of the Michigan Public Service Commission in the Telecommunications Division, there are eight providers of publicly available payphones that provide service to public payphones across Michigan. While the Commission doesn't have extensive records of payphones, Warner noted that the 2012 information listed approximately 2,783 public payphones in Michigan in 2011, a decade prior to the data referenced in this entry. A staggering loss of 2,409 payphones in 10 years!
On life support, but the line still live, payphones in Michigan persist. I finally have my map and have started to find treasure, let's start exploring the data, all of which is based on the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) database from a FOIA in November 2021 unless otherwise noted.
The Location of Public Payphones in Michigan that May or May Not Operate
Neat. Now what? (Source: Michigan Public Service Commission, November 2021)
Looking at the map, it appears that the payphone locations are scattered across the state, so here is a breakdown by county.
Number of Payphones Per County
Heatmap of Public Payphone Location Density in Michigan That May or May Not Operate
On the heatmap of location density, the bias towards southeast Michigan becomes more evident. As does Michigan's population . Let's zoom in on southeast Michigan anyway and see what's going on in that yellow blob.
As the blobs isolate, the nuance becomes evident with dispersed concentrations of fewer phones.
Clicking on the icons reveals the last known name of the location of these phones. Hospitals, social service agencies, municipal buildings, gas stations seem to come up often. Let's look into that bright yellow spot below Jackson.
This high concentration in Brooklyn isn't hipsters ironically collecting payphones, this is Brooklyn, Michigan , a village with roughly 1,200 people. Where Brooklyn Road intersects with US 12 is the Michigan International Speedway, with 50 phones located at one address, making this the highest concentration of payphones.
On the other end of the spectrum, this payphone near the far west end of the upper peninsula is the phone most isolated from its kin. The nearest Michigan payphone is in Pelkie, roughly 70 miles away.
These two layers create an ugly mess, but that ugly mess is us. The lighter yellow represents higher population, darker purple a lower population. If you happen to know where correctional facilities are in Michigan, you'll note that there are no payphone hotspots there. According to the MPSC, there are "2,909 correctional payphones" but those are serviced differently and not part of this dataset.
The mess clears up when you zoom in, to see how the heat map connects with population. As we can see in the upper peninsula, most of the payphones are located in low population areas.
Switching from population by county to population density, the few dark areas representing higher density, the payphones appear mostly outside of dense areas.
In this part of lower Michigan payphones tend to be focused where population is dense.
And moving slightly east reveals a number of payphones away from dense populations.
Payhones do appear to be generally clustered where population is, use the zoom tools on the bottom right to investigate.
Number of Payphones Per Person
With the heat map showing some concentrations of phones away from population centers, and the apparently high ratio of phones in the upper peninsula, I suspected that there might be a relationship of Census places (essentially, municipalities like townships and cities, Census sumlev 60 and 160 ) with low population to a higher payphone count. For places with a population under 10,000 people, there is an average of 5.3 times more phones per 10,000 people than places with populations over 10,000.
If you find yourself needing to call the doctor for a sick spouse and need access to a payphone, hopefully you're in a small town.
Only 114 out of 1,806 Michigan places—a mere 6.3 percent!—have a payphone, and when we look at the averages of payphones per 10,000 people in only those 114 places, the average jumps to 27 times more payphones per 10,000 people in lower population places.
Number of Payphones Per Peninsula
The Upper Peninsula has fewer people overall, and only has two places with more than 10,000 people, so my hunch was that there would be more phones per 10,000 people in the Upper Peninsula. With nearly 10 times fewer phones in the UP but with a population of only 301,608 people, the UP has over 32 times fewer people than the 9,775,723 people in the Lower Peninsula according to the 2020 Census.
Turns out Matt's joke about 138 payphones in the UP was optimistic by exactly 100. Baraga County has 57.9% of those payphones, the most phones of all the counties in the Upper Peninsula, with 22 payphones.
Location of Payphones that May or May Not Operate with Median Household Income
On this map of median household income this map, most of the dots on the map are located in the purpler counties that are below the $65,000 national median of median household income averaged over five years by the American Community Survey. To be fair, most Michigan counties are purple.
Focusing in on some of the payphones in relatively wealthier Washtenaw County, four of the six payphones are located in areas with lower median household income.
In Oakland county, by contrast, most of the phones are located in census tracts with a high median household income. While Madison Heights on the Macomb County border does have two, Pontiac—with the lowest median household income—has none.
While Van Buren County (Paw Paw), Kalamazoo County (Kalamazoo), and Calhoun County (Battle Creek) have median household incomes below the national average, the payphones in those counties are located in the census tracts that have lower than average median household income.
The very first coin operated public payphone was an option intended to be more accessible than expensive subscription services. As home phones, mobile phones, and the Internet each gained wider adoption, the payphone remained as an option utilized by those unable to afford the other options.
Location of Payphones that May or May Not Operate with Internet Connectivity
While access to the internet isn't a direct replacement for the need of a payphone, the amount of information accessible on the internet could potentially alleviate it. In this map, darker areas represent portions of the population with no internet access.
Focusing in the Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb tri-county area, payphones tend to be located in or adjacent to Census tracts with lower internet connectivity.
Looking at the upper peninsula where there is the highest number of phones per 10,000 people, there is also a generally low internet connectivity rate. The darkest purple represent counties with over 22% of the population without internet.
Where does it end?
According to Warner at the MPSC, they contact "all known active payphone service providers each year to ensure they are still providing service, and to obtain information regarding the number of payphones that are active, etc." Michigan has lost 86.6% of it's public payphones in the last decade, and having personally found two that have clearly been out of service for a while, the number may be even higher.
There are two Futel phones in Michigan, one in Detroit and another in Ypsilanti. In place of the loss of coin operated public payphones, Futel phones are filling the gap by offering free public phones using old payphones that are funded by donors and maintained by volunteers. Payphones in the UK with their iconic booths still make 5 million calls each year as of 2021, and are being preserved by dedicated fans; the phoneless booths are a tabula rasa for newly imagined purposes, like museums, art galleries, coffee shops, pubs, and smartphone repair shops . After the 2011 tsunami in Japan, a disconnected payphone booth became a meaningful medium for confronting the loss of loved ones who suddenly disappeared in the tragedy.
We never know when today's ubiquitous technology will become archaic. Movie time travel has gone from phone booths to hot tubs. Coin-operated vending machines—perhaps more cross-generationally familiar than payphones—an important precursor to the coin-operated payphone, traces its roots to a coin operated holy-water-vending machine created by Hero of Alexandria roughly 1,900 years before the coin-operated payphone. The fax machine—still remarkably in use today—has it's roots in the 1843 "Electric Printing Telegraph," 46 years before the first payphone. I suspect most people born in the age of twitter have little conception of a public payphone (though they can follow payphone content ), and people born in a future age will find the idea of twitter just as archaic. As an elder millennial I've experienced the quick transition through the modes of communication that have progressed in the last few decades. Some of these transitions happened quickly, as MySpace and Blackberrys practically disappeared overnight as Facebook and smartphones exploded into use. But other transitions, especially those physically established, have happened slowly as their utility diminishes over time.
Without a dedicated movement to preserve or remove them, there's no telling how much longer these phones will last. As Facebook and others push virtual worlds like the Metaverse, the cycle of obsolescence continues, and yet, the icon on my smartphone to make a phone call still bears more resemblance to the ancient payphone than anything we're looking forward to in the future.
That is all. For now.