The New Pornographers wrote and recorded this wistful elegy for the long-lostd last payphone in New York City.

I missed the news that in May 2022 New York City officially removed its last public payphone, marking the end of an era. And now that era has been commemorated in this beautifully elegiac song by The New Pornographers.

Melancholic and ethereal, with Neko Case backing A.C. Newman’s vocals, The Ballad Of The Last Payphone is a wistful elegy for those little phone booths – not even booths, really, just poles with a phone and a hood to offer the barest minimum of privacy.

The first time I went to NYC it amazed me to find they could be found on literally every street corner, however dodgy the neighbourhood, and nearly all of them actually worked. Unlike London’s iconic red telephone boxes that invariably stank of piss and fags and often had a severed phone line.

Mind you, I now rather miss those little cards that sprang up at some point in the ’90s with cartoonish drawings of salacious young women in underwear offering “French lessons” and “Correction”. I had a friend who used to collect them and I bet there’s a market for this niche category of art today.

Apparently New York began removing its 6,000 payphones in 2015 as mobile phone use became ubiquitous and started to replace them with LinkNYC kiosks, which offer free fi-fi, charging stations and free domestic phone calls.

The new generation of kiosks also function as digital billboards, art displays and public service announcement platforms – something I never knew ’til now and which could fruitfully be copied here.

Band member A.C. Newman says the inspiration for the song was a Raymond Carver story called Fat that tells the story of a person visiting the last payphone in NYC where it currently sits, in the Museum of the City of New York.

It’s on display there as part of an exhibit about life in the city before computers, though there are four full-length phone booths left standing for posterity on the Upper West Side.