New York City disconnected its famous “payphone box”, the last public phone booth for coins this Monday (23), which has been replaced by free Wi-Fi terminals for years.

But rest assured Superman fans: Manhattan will hold four closed phone booths that journalist Clark Kent broke into to “become” a superhero.

This Monday morning, New York City put an end to a legend that has persisted in popular culture for decades in comics, photography, movies and television.

Journalists, city officials, and Manhattan Mayor Mark Levine witnessed the last “cab” (cab) with two telephones, which had been on the corner of 7th Street for years, being dismantled and hoisted onto a truck. Avenue and 50th Avenue are marked in the center of the Big Apple with the blue bell symbol of the telecommunications company Bell System.

“I went here today for the last goodbye to the famous – or embarrassing? – NYC payphone. I won’t miss the dial tones, but I have to admit, I felt a nostalgic knot in my stomach watching him go,” Levine wrote. from Twitter.

The Democrat said he doesn’t really miss the days when these phones worked a few times, when you had to rummage through your pockets for a quarter or stand in line to use the phone in the middle of the street and out of sight. .

With the popularity of mobile phones in the early 2000s, public phones began to disappear from the New York landscape and accelerated with the explosion of smartphones, or “smartphones”, from 2010 onwards.

Starting in 2015, Manhattan has accelerated the deployment of thousands of LinkNYC endpoints that offer free Wi-Fi and local calls. These new access points will gradually be connected to the 5G network.

“We really hope it’s the end of an era, but also the beginning of a new era of fairer access to technology,” Levine said, referring to upper Manhattan neighborhoods, particularly Harlem, where the phone and internet have worse coverage. cries.

According to local media, Manhattan will retain four old telephone booths on the Upper West Side, on West End Avenue, 66th, 90th, 100th, and 101st streets.