The phone booth was the confessional of the street. A glass box on the corner with a metal cord and a dial and for a dime you could talk to anybody in the world. The phone booth was private in public. You stepped inside and the city was on the other side of the glass and for the length of a phone call you were somewhere else. Musicians used phone booths. To call the club and beg for a gig. To call home and say I am not coming home tonight. To call a girl and play a song into the receiver.

Superman changed in a phone booth. That was the metaphor. Clark Kent walks into a phone booth and comes out Superman. The phone booth was the place where you became somebody else. I walked into a phone booth on Bleecker Street in nineteen sixty-six and called my mother and told her I was going to be a musician and she said get a job and I hung up and walked out of the phone booth and I was David Peel. The phone booth was my origin story. Everybody has a phone booth moment. The moment you step in one thing and step out another.

The phone booth had acoustics. I am serious. The glass walls and the metal frame created a small reverberating chamber. If you hummed in a phone booth it sounded like a recording studio. Kids used to sing in phone booths for the sound. Four kids crammed into a phone booth on Lenox Avenue singing doo-wop because the phone booth made their voices bigger. The phone booth was the cheapest recording studio in New York. The rent was a dime and the session lasted until somebody needed to make a call.

They removed the phone booths. Not because nobody used them. Because everybody had a phone in their pocket. But the phone in your pocket is not a phone booth. The phone in your pocket does not have walls. The phone in your pocket does not give you privacy. The phone in your pocket is a surveillance device that you carry voluntarily. The phone booth was anonymous. You dropped a dime and the city did not know who was calling. Try being anonymous with a smartphone. The phone booth was the last anonymous technology.

I miss the phone booth. I miss the glass door closing and the city going quiet for a minute. I miss dropping a dime into a slot and hearing a voice on the other end. I miss the human-sized space on a human-sized corner in a city that was built for humans. The phone booth said you are a person and you deserve three square feet of privacy and here it is for a dime. The city took away the phone booths and replaced them with WiFi kiosks that track your location. Progress. They took away your confessional and gave you a surveillance camera. They called it an upgrade.