Vanishing History: Rupert Pupkin’s Payphone

A city is like a living, breathing entity in that it is constantly undergoing growth and change. Fortunately, films have helped capture the looks of certain locations at a specific moment in time, preserving them for future generations.

One of the changes currently being seen in many major metropolises is the disappearance of the phone booth. With the ever increasing use of the cell phone, the small, street corner glass and burnished metal cabinets where one could make a quick call have slowly been fading away to history.

And when it happens to the bank of pay phones behind the NYPD station in Manhattan’s Times Square, that means a small piece of movie history has also disappeared, for this was the bank of phones used by Robert DeNiro’s character Rupert Pupkin in Martin Scorsese’s King Of Comedy.

According to a report over at Vanishing New York, the payphone bank where Pupkin once had his “office” has gone the way of so many other pay phones in the area. Now all that is there are some police barricades and a few patrol bicycles. Thankfully, directors like Scorsese were able to capture the feel of Manhattan in the 1970s giving us something to look back on as the city transmogrifies itself for the 21st century.