What do we see?
A phone box, which went from everyday object to museum piece at a rapid pace. From 2010 onwards KPN removed the boxes from our city in quick succession. Yet Amsterdam has a special bond with the phone box, because in 1931 the first box in the country stood on the Valeriusplein. This was still a simple grey box. It has of course been preserved and now stands in the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague. Phone boxes were at their peak at the moment the city snapshot accompanying this article was taken, in the 1980s. At many phone boxes there were sometimes queues of people waiting to make a call of a few minutes. Because the boxes were made of glass they were, like bus shelters, regular targets for vandalism. The two phone boxes in the photo accompanying this article stand on Leidseplein, right next to the Hirsch building. The damage was probably caused by Luilak (a boisterous night of pranks on the eve of Whitsun), a few days earlier.
What happened in the years that followed?
KPN's legal obligation to operate phone boxes lapsed in 2008. In 2011 the company had already announced it would stop with phone boxes because they were no longer profitable. A commercial company took over some of the phone boxes and kept them running for a few more years. Eventually that company gave up too, in 2016. A nice detail: although Amsterdam was the first city with a phone box, it was not the last city to still have one. By the time the very last phone boxes disappeared from the country in 2016, the ones in our city had long since gone. On the Rokin, in front of the KPN shop, the last box had already disappeared around 2014...
