I recently noticed that there are no more Verizon curbside pay phones in NYC. Apparently an advertising company called Titan bought them a year ago, and took them over in the spring. This affected 30% of curbside phones -- the rest are owned by smaller companies.
This does not affect phones on NYC Transit property (including street- level phones at subway entrances), nor phones in NYC parks. Those are still owned by Verizon.
For several years, I've heard a lot of complaints that most curbside pay phones were missing or broken, since they only make money from the advertising they display. But I hardly ever had trouble using a Verizon phone, and when I did, it was easy to get a refund.
However, when I tried to use a Titan phone, the quarter got stuck in the slot, and when I called 211 for a refund as listed on the instructions, it rang forever.
I looked around for another phone, and more than half of the Titan phones in the neighborhood were missing, or had stickers that said "NO DIAL TONE" and had major damage. Here are some pictures taken by other people:
While pay phones obviously aren't as important as they once were, they still get used reasonably often in NYC. And they're especially important in emergencies, when cell phone networks don't work or don't have enough capacity. Here's a picture of a crowd waiting to use a pay phone during the 2003 blackout: