Benjamin Patir called his son because he was lonely and, perhaps more important, because he had a quarter. Robert J. Covelli called his son, too, to find out if, at some point during the more than 24 hours he spent in custody, he had become, for the first time, a grandfather. Frank Federico, fresh from a courthouse jail cell, called his mother, who spared him any lectures and asked him if he needed a ride home.

The three men used the same curbside pay phone on a busy block of Queens Boulevard last week. So did Carlos Luciano, who lent his cellphone to his wife. And Alex Santana, who bought a banana to get change. And Marvin McCain, a subway conductor trying to call in sick, and two men uninterested in giving their names or explaining why, at midnight on a neon-lit stretch of Kew Gardens, Queens, they had to make a call.

Everybody knows the public pay phone is dying, but nobody inclined to watch this one would believe it. It sits across the street from Queens Criminal Court, on a patch of sidewalk facing Fast & Fresh Supermarket Deli & Grocery. In the age of the iPhone and the BlackBerry, in a city where cellphones are cheaper and more plentiful than toasters, the pay phone outside Fast & Fresh is outdated, outnumbered, outperformed.

Yet this grimy phone — in a silvery booth that Superman would have skipped over, for it is doorless and not fully enclosed — survives and, in its own nickel-and-dime way, thrives.