LEOMINSTER — Phone booths once seemed to be on every street corner waiting for a nickel, dime or quarter to call home to tell the family you’d be late for dinner.
“Now they are extinct,” Mazzarella said.
Almost.
There’s a phone booth at the corner of Merriam Avenue and Main Street, as well as one in City Hall.
Neither one has a telephone anymore.
These aren’t phones that only have partitions on walls, but full-fledged booths.
The City Hall booth still has a door and even though the post office booth no longer has one, it still offers some privacy for someone on a cellphone, or shelter to anybody waiting to cross the intersection on a rainy day.
It’s unclear when the phone was taken out of the post office booth.
“It was thrown out before we knew it,” said Historical Commission member Rocco “Rocky” Palmieri.
The phone booth has a long history in the consciousness of America and Hollywood.
Superman used booths to change into his cape. Maxwell Smart entered Control headquarters through a telephone booth, and reporters on the silver screen rushed to deliver breaking news to their editors.
The phone booth in City Hall is safe, but Mazzarella wants to preserve the one outside the post office.
“This is a historic downtown. We have to start looking at things that are going to vanish completely,” Mazzarella said.
City officials will gather Aug. 5 for a downtown planning session and the telephone booth will be part of the conversation.
“We’ve reached a lot of goals we were reaching for,” Mazzarella said of the planning. “So it’s, ‘now where do we go from here?’ ”
Mazzarella envisions a reinvention of the phone booth to make it functional again.
One potential use is a miniature visitors booth.
It could be used for literature and placards about events and sites around the city.
“It’s still a good way to communicate,” Mazzarella said.
The phone booth isn’t the only piece of Americana downtown.
Police Officer Randy Thomas recently commissioned the restoration of a working fire alarm pull box in Monument Square.
Palmieri at the Historical Commission said he took a picture of the post office phone booth for the files.
“There are whole generations who never used a phone booth,” Mazzarella said.
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