After Sandy, Wired New Yorkers Get Reconnected With Pay Phones

Natural disasters tend to vindicate the public pay phone. With their clunky bodies mounted high and sometimes behind glass stalls, they generally remain serviceable during power outages, even amid flooding. When times get tough, in fact, the biggest challenge is often keeping the devices free of coin overloads.

"Phones that normally do two dollars a day are taking in $50 a day," says Peter Izzo of Van Wagner Communications, one of 13 local pay-phone-operating franchises in New York City. "In times of distress, the people of the city love them." After the storm struck, people under umbrellas waited in line at some pay phones downtown. "During disasters, we sometimes have to empty them every day," says Thomas Keane, chief executive officer of Pacific Telemanagement Services, a pay-phone operator whose New York locations include transit stations, hospitals and police offices. "It takes 300 to 400 calls a day for that to happen."