The last known working phone booth in the Washington, D.C. area is history:
It was a Washington monument of sorts, one of the last known working phone booths in the region and one of only a handful left in the United States.
Now it’s history.
Verizon Communications dismantled the phone booth in Arlington County this year. Its remains were thrown into the back of a truck and hauled to a Verizon storage facility. All that’s left at 10th and Irving streets in Clarendon is the concrete base on which it stood for decades.
“We took it out because the volume of calls was very low,” said Sandy Arnette, spokeswoman for Verizon. Officials said late last year that about five calls a day were being made from the booth. “Economically, that kind of volume just doesn’t make much sense.”
So far, no museums are calling.
There was no public demand to keep or restore the booth to its 1970s glory for posterity, Arnette said. It wasn’t much to look at — crooked, pocked, missing a front door and a plastic pane or two. But still, there it was, available for calls, the kind of booth Superman used to sneak into.
The booth is down but not out, Arnette said. It could be reassembled. “Sometimes we get requests to use them in movies. So that could happen,” she said.
Once a fixture on street corners, phone booths have largely disappeared from the national landscape, despite a lingering nostalgia for them in Hollywood, as evidenced by such films as “Phone Booth,” a 2002 thriller about a man trapped in one by a sniper, and the “Superman” movies.
No public phone booths have been put up in years. They’ve been replaced by pedestal-style pay phones, which are easier to maintain, take up less room, meet national standards for accessibility by the disabled, and are less conducive to crime or likely to collect trash.
And who uses a pay phone these days anyway ?
