The phone booth installation “Once Upon a Place†in Times Square examines the immigrant experience, broadly touching on themes of belonging and displacement.
Credit Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesEven amid the cacophony of Times Square, the sounds of telephones ringing every seven to nine minutes are hard to miss. No, it’s not coming from your pocket or your purse, and no, you’re not imagining things.
The source of the calls â€" and of the curiosity of passers-by â€" is three phone booths in Duffy Square, between 45th and 47th Streets. Yes, phone booths: They may be reminiscent of a yesteryear largely confined to the movies, but they are now back for public use.
Well, sort of.
Salvaged from LinkNYC, the city program replacing pay phones with Wi-Fi kiosks, the booths are part of the latest installation from Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance. The project, “Once Upon a Place,†by Aman Mojadidi and on view through Sept. 5, examines the immigrant experience through oral histories presented in the form of phone calls, broadly touching on themes of belonging and displacement.
“The idea of the stories and use of the phone booths were conceived together,†said Mr. Mojadidi, an Afghan-American artist. “I was already fascinated with the removal of phone booths and the fact that they were dying out. I’ve used them quite a bit before mobile phones came, so to see them start to go away, I figured you could imagine all the stories that have already been told through phone booths.â€
Although Mr. Mojadidi originally envisioned the booths around the city, their final location was symbolic and practical.
“It made sense with the notion of what Times Square is â€" a highly visible, international space,†he said, adding that he hoped that the installation would prompt listeners to explore their lineage and to challenge stereotypes about immigration. “This issue of immigration has become so politicized. Globally, any sort of major city is built on immigration rather than destroyed by it.â€
Mr. Mojadidi and his team spent two months reconfiguring the phone booths at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There they made sure that the doors actually closed; installed a swivel apparatus to hold a mock phone book containing information about the storytellers’ communities in New York featured on the calls; and put in plexiglass skylight domes, among other items. While he originally favored an opaque material for the booths, to heighten a sense of intimacy, Mr. Mojadidi ultimately opted not to “fight against the visual chaos of the place†and left the booths translucent, with graffiti intact.
The phones themselves were converted into audio players and loaded with 70 stories collected across the city over several months.
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