Telephone Booth: From the Vaults

This From the Vault post was originally written by Tess Colwell and published on October 4, 2017 by the Brooklyn Historical Society. To see the latest Photo of the Week entries, visit the Brooklynology blog home, or subscribe to our Center for Brooklyn History newsletter.

In the not-so-distant past, telephone booths could be seen on nearly every street in New York City. Today, there are only four remaining old-style, glass, enclosed, functioning sidewalk phone booths along West End Avenue in Manhattan. The photo of the week depicts a yard worker making a phone call in a telephone booth at the Brooklyn Navy Yard around 1965.

This photograph comes from the Anthony Costanzo Brooklyn Navy Yard collection comprised of materials documenting the years just prior to the decommissioning of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1966. The collection includes photographs, newspaper clippings, souvenirs, letters, promotional materials, press releases, and directories. To view more photographs from this collection, check out the gallery.

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal of Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.