The wooden phone booths inside a private Midtown clubhouse

This week has turned out to be themed around vintage phone booths on Ephemeral New York. First came four glass beauties still extant along West End Avenue, the last remaining outdoor booths in New York City.

Next up is another old-school telephone discovery: a row of wooden phone booths—with restored wood chairs, small tables, accordion doors, and amazingly, actual phones—along a wall inside the Harvard Club, at 27 West 44th Street.

Did these booths once have pay phones? I’m not sure; perhaps part of being a club member meant the house picked up the charges. Members today, of course, would only duck into one to hold a private cell phone conversation.

These old wood phone booths are a rare find in the contemporary city, but discovering and documenting them allows us to time travel back to a much different New York City.

Until the 1980s and 1990s, every hotel and public building, as well as most restaurants, bars, and drugstores, had at least one public telephone booth along with a bulky paper phone directory for customers, clients, and locals who didn’t have a phone of their own. (And many people didn’t, often by choice. Imagine!)

The Harvard Club itself has its own historical cred. Designed by Charles McKim and opened in 1894, the clubhouse featured a “grill room,” offices, a library, and a couple of card and billiard rooms. McKim, a Harvard man and club member who took no fee for his work, modeled the Georgian-style brick and limestone exterior to resemble those in Harvard Yard, according to the Harvard Club website.

The club was expanded and renovated over the years, sometimes to create more space but also to keep up with social changes.

In 1973, the ladies’ entrance to the club was removed and women were admitted as full members. Though some Harvard graduate programs admitted women, Harvard and its sister school, Radcliffe College, didn’t merge their admissions until 1975.

[Top and second photos: Susan Schwartz; third photo: Wikipedia]

Found: two more vintage wood phone booths

They’re rare, but a few are still out there: the lovely wood booths New Yorkers used to slip into (closing the hinged door behind them for privacy and not to disturb anyone) to make a phone call.

Old bars are a good place to look for them. The Ear Inn, on Spring Street, is one of the city’s oldest taverns—and right inside the front door is a beautiful vintage booth (above) with a stool, overhead fan, and a stand that supports an ATM machine.

In better shape but also lacking a phone is this wooden booth, located on the second floor of the magnificent headquarters of the General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen, at 20 West 44th Street.

The door is also hinged, and there’s a little stand where the phone once sat.

A label inside actually notes that the booth was patented in 1919 and lists a phone booth distributor in Brooklyn called the Turner Armour Corporation.

The phone is lovely, but the building itself is a marvel of wonderfully preserved wooden book cases, light fixtures, interior detailing, and a soaring staircase out of the movies.