Hartford Pay Phone #38: Suspicious Package Edition

If there is one thing all Hartfordites can agree on, it's our love of everything pay phone! Pay Phone #38 is located on the corner of Hungerford and Park and is the first Pay Phone to be featured on Sad City in 2012. Newer readers might not be aware that we have been conducting a citywide search for Hartford Pay Phones since the summer of 2010 when we learned that the first pay phone in North America was located in Hartford.



Instead of doing the obvious and writing about the decline of the pay phone and Northeast industrial cities, then blaming factors that fit into our political beliefs, we decided we'd instead celebrate the history of the pay phone in Hartford by seeing how many were still active. One day we hope we will see a Pay Phone Museum in our fine city. For now, the closest thing we have is the The Pay Phone album over at CT Photo Junkie.

Here at Pay Phone #38 we encountered not one, not two, but three suspicious packages. That's got to be some sort of record. We then found ourselves in a quandary of sorts. While we wanted to be good citizens and examine the packages, we also wanted to obey the "No Loitering" sign in the neighboring grocer. In the end our desire not to loiter won out and we did not get to investigate what might be contained in the tote sack, garbage bag, and paper bag. Feel free to venture any guesses of your own.