NYC Call Box

http://prezi.com/qllbacwtamtt/call-boxes/

We walk past at least one every day. They are always there when we need them for an emergency. They never move and they stand out in their red coats. I am not talking about a British Royal Guard. I am talking about call boxes!

Call boxes are remarkable. During the middle ages of America when no one had an IPhone, people used this to get into contact with police or the fire department and the response was almost instantaneous.

But where does one get this inspiration to make a collage for a simple city utility? Well, one day I was reading up on the murder of Kitty Genovese and in the police report, it mentioned she tried to go to the call box. That lit an incandescent light bulb in my head and I was inspired. I walked a five-block radius around my house and saw how many call boxes are still there. Some were working, while others were broken. It didn’t matter. I took pictures of both of them.

Viola! I get my collage. Instead of the central image being that of a call box, I have it of a street light with an orange bulb on top. The bulb was on at night and was used to let someone know that on any of the four corners of the street, there is a call box. With that in mind, I made the collage design with four corners in order to show the same idea.

In the first corner I have pictures on when call boxes were practical. I honor Kitty Genovese because she is the reason I am doing this project. I found pictures of a man in the 1950s, but the point of the picture is to emphasize on the call box in the box. The last image in this corner is a functioning one two block away. I always walk on that avenue to get to school, but I never really paid any attention to it.

In the second corner, I focus on the decay of non-functioning call boxes. It was rather sad. Some of them had garbage stuffed into them, but the day I went to take pictures, it was cleaned out. Still, there is extreme paint damage, graffiti, and rust on many of these structures. I found one with the number 1929, the year when it was established. To know something this old exists in my neighborhood and that it is going through such negligence, really did tell me that we should preserve the history that we have.

In the third corner, I have images explaining the cause of this decline in call boxes. First I have a functioning call box with the sticker “False Alarms Kill”. That was always an issue with call boxes. A lot of pranksters would call for help and run away. The police couldn’t just ignore them. It was common protocol to check if everything was okay. Doing this diverts emergency resources from where actual emergencies were happening. The second image is that of a cell phone. Honestly, I believe that the cell phone killed the call box. A cell phone in a sense is a miniature call box. The final image is the side picture of the call box with the sticker. Why I picked this picture is because it looks as if there is a noose around the “neck” of the device and it reiterates my belief that the call box is dead.

The last corner represents the first step of urban renewal. It is only one picture of a call box in Woodside where someone painted over it.  Sadly, I didn’t get to see this work of art. I found a blog and copied it on my collage. As a result of this mysterious painter, he or she created something aesthetic. This represents a hope that one day the local government would recognize the important of these devices by sponsoring artists to re-paint them. Thus, creating something pleasant to the eye as we walk on the street.