When in Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza one does, of course, check in on the old rotary dial payphone. Always. The ritual dates back centuries, when Native Americans used this phone to direct dial into the future.

Located in the building behind the World War II Memorial I no longer remember when or how I first made this payphone’s acquaintance. Carbon-14 dating fails to provide an exact date for this phone but its number, 212-625-9326, dates from when all five boroughs of New York fell under a single 212 area code.

The phone shows a trifecta of phone company names, with New York Telephone, Bell Atlantic, and Verizon all represented. The “Collect Dial” number, 1-800-USE-THE-“VZ”, no longer works, though 1-800-COLLECT does. That would be good information to have should you find yourself needing to engage in the nearly extinct behavior of making a collect call from a payphone, or from any phone.

No dial tone sings from this ancient bit of telephonic detritus, but the calming sound of the rotary dial spinning as I dialed this payphone’s disconnected number reminded me of years past, before the pace of communication became so hyperventilated and continuous.