A Relic, If You Can Keep It

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Looking at the map, it appears that the payphone locations are scattered across the state, so here is a breakdown by county.

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.

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.

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.

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.