Imperial Beach phone booth dumped

For years, a phone booth sat on the corner just outside of the Siesta RV Park in the 400 block of Palm Avenue in Imperial Beach.

Made of aluminum and glass with a light in the ceiling, it shut out the noise of the busy street, allowing you to talk to someone miles away in privacy. That phone booth was recently taken away to the dump.

Butch, the RV park’s maintenance man, reports that he removed the booth about three months ago. “It sat inside the park for years,” he said. “It kept getting vandalized, so we moved it to the front. The vandalism continued and the phone hadn’t worked in years, so the decision was made to get rid of it. Nobody misses it because it never worked. They use the pay phone at the nearby 7-Eleven.”

The first phone booth in the United States was installed in 1889 in a bank in Hartford, Connecticut.

Today those booths have been replaced by pedestal-style pay phones which offer no privacy and apparently don’t get cleaned or repaired often enough.