Suburban Station

Ironically located in the heart of Philadelphia, the stylish Suburban Station has been one of the city’s main transportation hubs for nearly one hundred years. Opened as an underground terminal for Pennsylvania Railroad commuter trains, it was created to replace the aboveground Broad Street Station, which handled steam engines. It still runs regional and local underground trains for the throngs of passengers who pass through its distinct art-deco entrance every day.

When the Broad Street Suburban Station Building opened in 1930 as a stub-end terminal for commuter trains, it appeared to signal a new, technologically advanced era, complete with exciting, literally flashing lights broadcasting the city’s strides in modernization.

Suburban Station remains a well-trafficked landmark of Philadelphia, a city whose power lies equally in its capacity to look ahead for new, bright ideas and its instinct to revere and recognize the many tones of its past. A quirky amateur phone collective named PhilTel is striving to do a little of both. Their mission is to give new life to pay phones. They’re doing this by preserving long-silent old public phones, while also installing new ones that (by using coinless circuit boards, rewired to connect through the internet) will cost nothing—allowing residents and visitors to Philly to communicate free of charge with anybody in North America.

The target benefactors are those who can’t afford a cell phone, but the mission also scratches an itch for those who feel nostalgic for the thousands of pay phones we used to see on most streets. There are only about fifty still wired in Philadelphia—two of them evidently in Suburban Station—but the collective is hoping to change that…without requiring any change.

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