Two pay phones remain nostalgic symbols of a time when a few coins and a memorized number were all one needed to make a call.
In the rapid march toward a digital-only future, rare remnants of Vancouver’s analog past still serve as lifelines for some residents.
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Two pay phones — one in an old hotel and the other on the Downtown Eastside — remain nostalgic symbols of a time when a few coins and a memorized number were all one needed to make a call.
The Ivanhoe Hotel, built in the early 1900s, now operates as a backpacker’s hostel in Strathcona. On the ground floor, a Telus pay phone charges a modest 50 cents per call — and it gets plenty of use.
“It has a dial tone and everything, and people keep pumping quarters into it,” a bartender at the Ivanhoe Pub said Saturday.
For Stanley Woodvine, a former graphic designer who has lived through more than two decades of homelessness, discovering a functional pay phone was a surprise.
“I can’t believe it,” the 63-year-old said, noting that people like him don’t always have access to a cell phone.
Though Woodvine hasn’t used a public pay phone in years, he recalls the days when he was sleeping in a car park and relied on a crowd-sourced Google map to locate all the city’s remaining pay phones.
“I used it to make calls all the time,” he said of keeping connected to friends and family.
Woodvine says the decline of pay phones affects homeless residents who rely on courtesy phones available at nonprofits across the city.
“As mobile phones became ubiquitous, public pay phones steadily disappeared from Vancouver’s streets,” said Woodvine.
In 2019, Bell reported only 13 pay phones remain — a stark contrast to the thousands that once dotted urban landscapes.
Woodvine said: “2020 was the final killing stroke for pay phones.”
He said COVID-19 dealt a decisive blow to the dwindling pay phone network. A mix of hygiene concerns, the widespread use of cell phones, and the shift to cashless payments made it difficult to maintain these relics.
“No one wanted to touch anything anymore.”
In a statement on Saturday, the Canadian telecommunications company Bell confirmed it no longer operates any pay phones in the province.
Nick Wells, spokesperson for the Union Gospel Mission, which serves homeless residents in the DTES, said: “For those who are chronically unhoused, not having a cell phone denies them a way to connect to the wider world.”
The Union Gospel Mission has a courtesy phone for the DTES community.
“We’ve seen people use for vital reasons, including to call their family, or to check if their medication is ready to pick up from the pharmacy,” Wells said.
At the Overdose Prevention Site (OPS) at 141 East Hastings, an old pay phone functions as a free courtesy phone and is used around the clock by community members, said Sarah Blyth, executive director of OPS.
“People call their families, call their doctor, call detox — it’s a lifeline for people in this community who do not have cell phones,” Blyth said.
Woodvine reminisced about the days when pay phones were in regular use, including one outside Hasty Market, a convenience store in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.
“If you would have asked me several years ago I would have said that pay phone would have survived for sure considering how popular it was,” he said. “But even that one is gone.”