Telephone booths are numbered in Barcelona. This week, I read in La Vanguardia that, throughout the State, this element of public street furniture will disappear in a year because it will no longer be mandatory for towns with more than a thousand inhabitants to have a telephone booth. There is no longer a need to have public telephones available to everyone because it is understood that, by now, everyone already has a personal one. So, paradoxical as it may seem, the success of the telephone has condemned the booth to disappearance.
In the streets of Barcelona there are still about fifty telephone booths, although I suspect that a significant part of them stopped working a long time ago. Whether due to lack of maintenance or too much vandalism, they are in a deplorable state. In 2019, Telefónica found that, in an entire year, not a single call had been made from half of the city's booths. Doesn't that make you a little sad?
Let's not kid ourselves either: telephone booths have never been an iconic element of Barcelona, as the mythical red booths are for London, and in what a way. As much as the double-decker buses of the same color or the black taxis. Perhaps for this reason, most Barcelonans don't care at all if they disappear. In fact, they won't even notice they're gone.
This indifference, however, has one exception: the last Garza model telephone booth remaining in the city.To understand each other, the one that had a roof and an aluminum and glass door, and allowed you to lock yourself inside to make a call. It was located in the Sant Genís dels Agudells neighborhood, in the Horta-Guinardó district, where it will return, once rehabilitated, to function as a book exchange point.There is no longer a need to have public telephones available to everyone because it is understood that, by now, everyone already has a personal one. So, paradoxical as it may seem, the success of the telephone has condemned the booth to disappearance.
Phone booths may become history in a few months because they are no longer useful to us, but this does not mean they will fall into oblivion.The cabin will forever be a reflection of Francoist Spain---priceless José Luís López Vázquez with his face pressed against the glass of this claustrophobic receptacle---, in the fantastic eponymous film directed by Antonio Mercero, in 1972. It will also forever be an improvised changing room for Clark Kent to put on his Superman suit. Or Tippi Hedren's precarious refuge, pursued by Hitchcock's birds.Of course, for lovers of spy novels like me, the phone booths on lonely streets in New York, Washington, Paris, London, or Berlin will always evoke the Cold War.phone booths have never been an iconic element of Barcelona, as the mythical red booths are for London and in what a way. Perhaps for this reason, most Barcelonians don't care at all if they disappear. What's more, they won't even notice they're gone.
Telephone booths have been immortalized in countless books and films. That's why we won't forget them. However, above all, they will live on in the sentimental memory of many people over forty who, in adolescence and early youth, that is, in the time of first loves, found in them the privacy that the family telephone did not provide.