[ed. Some people are awesome (others, not so much).]
“There aren’t a lot of people out,” he said. “You can just go down, find a good booth, carry it out, latch it in. It takes seconds. And then just fill it up with books and let’s wait and see what happens.”
Last winter, Mr. Locke designed a lightweight set of bookshelves to fit inside the common Titan brand of New York City pay phone kiosks. A fabricator in Brooklyn cuts the shelves, which Mr. Locke paints and assembles in his apartment.
So far he has carried out four installations, most recently at Amsterdam Avenue and West 87th Street just before 8 a.m. on a Sunday last month.
As several sleepy-eyed patrons of a 24-hour deli looked on in confusion, Mr. Locke snapped a lime green bookcase into place, stocking it with children’s books and paperback novels.
Hooks on the unit allow Mr. Locke to install it without hardware, and the entire process took less than five minutes.
He had barely rounded the corner before a man who had been standing outside the deli began browsing through titles, choosing “The Shining” by Stephen King, tucking it under his arm and heading home.
What happens to the installations after the first few minutes is a bit of a mystery to Mr. Locke. He checks on them periodically, he said, until they disappear — after a few days or a few weeks. Which is fine with him.
“It’s a spontaneous thing that just erupts at certain locations,” he said. “People like it, people are inspired by it, but then it disappears again.”
The libraries have endured long enough to attract their share of fans. Publishing houses, bookstores and neighbors have approached Mr. Locke to donate books for future installations. The project is currently being featured in Spontaneous Interventions, the United States’ contribution to the International Venice Architecture Biennale, an architecture show.
If any disused fixture of city streets cried out for repurposing, it would seem to be the pay phone. The city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications acknowledges as much. In July, the department began soliciting ideas about what to do with the city’s remaining 13,000 sidewalk pay phones once the current contracts expire in 2014. (...)
The city is also engaged in a pilot project to use pay phones as Wi-Fi hot spots. Eleven pay phones, including ones in every borough but the Bronx, have been providing free Wi-Fi since July. About 2,000 people logged on to the networks in August, according to the city. Users stayed connected for an average of 38 minutes.
Mr. Locke, who has an aversion to outdoor advertising, said he wanted nothing to do with the city’s initiative. He does post the plans for his shelves on his Web site, in the hope that people will install their own versions in their own neighborhoods.
by Joshua Brustein, NY Times | Read more:
