The Good Phone Project adds more free payphones

With a grant from the Genesee Valley Council for the Arts, three newly repurposed payphones—providing free VoIP service—were added in Rochester by the Good Phone Project last week, a tiny step toward replacing the over 1,400 that used to exist in the city.

Frontier Communications disconnected those phones two years ago, leaving non-cellphone owners with limited access to a modern-day necessity.

“Frontier, for years, was losing money on these payphones, but they were still maintaining them for the greater good rather than profits. Nobody really talked about that,” says Eric Kunsman, a photographer and professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. “But now, since they’re getting ready to sell (to Verizon), they need to get rid of negative things on their books. So, they’re leaving the sector, and we’re trying to take over some of that.

“There are still a lot of people using payphones in Rochester, because of our socioeconomic situation,” he notes. “If we don’t supply some sort of access to communication, what are they going to do when they’re looking for a job, when they’re trying to communicate with their family?”

Kunsman first began documenting city payphones in 2017 with his photo series, “Felicific Calculus: Technology as a Social Marker of Race, Class, & Economics in Rochester, NY.”

Recognizing the need for this service among vulnerable populations, Kunsman and five others started the Good Phone Project, a nonprofit that works to provide free payphones to the community. The first opened in the summer of 2024 at the Father Tracy Advocacy Center on North Clinton Avenue. Other organizations that have since become partners include the People’s Pantry on Avenue D and the Lyell Branch Library on Lyell Avenue.

With the additions last week, the Good Phone Project now has six locations across Rochester, with at least one in each city quadrant.

Two of the new locations are outdoor; one on Monroe Avenue next to Blessed Sacrament Church, and the other on Genesee Street, near the Teen Empowerment building.

The outdoor locations come with an increased upfront cost: about $500 compared with $150 for an indoor equivalent. (Phone data plans, which are covered by Good Phone, are about $40 to $45 a month.) With Rochester’s weather and exposure to the elements, there is also the potential for greater wear and tear. However, the outdoor locations are more accessible, with 24/7 availability.

“The Father Tracy phone was being used an average of 600 times a month. That’s with it only being open Monday through Friday, 9 to 5,” Kunsman says. “We also get logs, so we can see that 20 percent of the calls are going to social services.”

He credits Deacon Duncan Harris, who is in charge of social justice and outreach at Blessed Sacrament Church, with planning and acquiring the solar panel and batteries, which will power the phone at Monroe Avenue. Kunsman believes it is the first such payphone in the U.S. to use such a system.

As part of the GVCA grant, Good Phone specifically engaged the youth community to decorate the two new outdoor phone booths. For example, the Flower City Arts Center will display photos taken by students in their after-school program on the Monroe Avenue phone booth, while youth leaders from Teen Empowerment will paint the booth on Genesee Street.

This both engages the community with Good Phone’s project and reduces the stigma around using the booths, something Kunsman says payphone users have communicated they still struggle with.

The phones are upcycled payphones, converted into VoIP (voice over internet protocol) phones, meaning they make calls over broadband internet rather than traditional phone lines.

Calls have a 20-minute maximum duration unless they are made to a social service organization, which are allowed an unlimited length since there is a higher likelihood of being on hold. A voicemail box is also available for users, with a guide on setting it up in the booth.

“The voicemail is accessible across all the network of our phones, so if your family wants to send you a message, if your doctor needs to let you know important information, if a job has to get in touch with you, this can make that possible,” says Kunsman.

Currently, calls can be made anywhere in the country. Kunsman adds that, depending on usage and feedback, there may be a need to include international calls in the future.

He also foresees a greater need for these phone services, with libraries in particular reaching out to Good Phone due to increased requests.

“The Winton Branch Library just reached out to us because, with everything that’s been going on in the world today, they’re seeing an increase in people wanting to use their front desk phones,” Kunsman says. “The Buffalo (library system) also reached out two weeks ago asking if we’d be able to expand to Buffalo because their payphones were ripped out and they’re seeing the same need we are in our libraries.”

Ultimately, the Good Phone Project hopes that, by highlighting the need and demonstrating the process of setting up free payphones, the city or county government will take on this responsibility, creating a more sustainable model. The project is currently run by volunteers and funded by grants and donations.

“Our main mission is, proving the need, so that this can become a larger resource that can be subsidized by the government,” says Kunsman. “(The Good Phone Project) costs less than the government-subsidized cell phones, some people called (them) ‘Obama phones,’ which ended in 2024.”

He adds: “Let’s put it this way, if a photo professor, other artists, a researcher, all of us with no one coming from telecom at all, can do this, anyone can do it.”

Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.

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