By Jason Emerson
Editor
Telephone Park on Albany Street will probably retain its name for years to come, but it will no longer have a public telephone.
The last freestanding, hardline public telephone in the village was removed on Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2017 by the village with cooperation from Windstream, the company that owned the telephone.
Ideas are currently being discussed as to what to erect in the telephone’s place, including such things as public art, a village map or a history of Telephone Park itself.
The telephone, which stood in the grass between the public parking lot in the Kinney Drugs plaza and the Albany Street sidewalk, has been there for decades but, as the new cell phone technology put a phone in every pocket, the public phone has rarely been used in recent years. It also has been a longtime target for vandalism, particularly in ripping the headset and attaching cord out of the phone body.
“The phone has been there as long as I can remember — going back to my childhood at least,” said Mayor Kurt Wheeler. “Its history of troubles I’m sure go back a long time, but at least for the past decade or more we have struggled along with Windstream to keep it in service. … It was probably out of commission as often as not.”
This past fall, a group of Cazenovia High School students participating in the Madison County Government Internship Program were looking for a project to undertake and, identifying the phone’s lack of use and its status as “an eyesore and an anachronism,” the students approached the village board about removing and replacing it, said Wheeler, who is also the students’ high school teacher.
The village board did not oppose the idea and the students, working with Village Department of Public Works Administrator Bill Carr, contacted Windstream and asked if the company would object to the telephone’s removal from the park, which it did not. The village DPW did the labor of the removal, Wheeler said.
“Given this week’s warm weather, the DPW had a break from their usual seasonal duties and took advantage of the opportunity to remove it, so they did,” he said.
Wheeler’s students have also been brainstorming ideas as to what to place at the telephone’s former location. One idea is a map or plaque to document the history of park, mark where the telephone used to be and note that it removed due to changing technology and times in 2017. “Someday, people will refer to Telephone Park and no one really know genesis of that,” Wheeler said.
Other ideas are to erect a map of all the parks in the Cazenovia area within walking distance from the center of the village and emphasize the greenspace and recreational activities available, and to place a piece of public art in the space.
Wheeler said he will ask his students and the members of the village board for input on what should be used to replace the telephone, with a goal of putting something in place within the next two or three months.
The grassy public area adjacent to the public parking lot, on the north side of Albany Street, has been colloquially called “Telephone Park” for decades because of the telephone standing there, although it is officially part of Memorial Park, which is also on the other side of Albany Street (although that side is typically known as “Cannon Park”).
Exactly when the park was dubbed “Telephone Park” is unclear; the earliest reference to it in the Cazenovia Republican archives is 1961.
Should Telephone Park be renamed the ‘public square’?
A September 1993 letter to the editor printed in the Cazenovia Republican offered some interesting history about Telephone Park and posits the writer’s opinion that it should instead be called the public square. Cazenovia Town Historian Peg Ladd wrote, “It concerns me that our public square is being referred to in the newspapers, by the merchants and by the village officials at Telephone Park. Has the name been officially changed?” Ladd then lists a number of references to the area as the “public square,” going all the way back to an 1808 map of the village. Ladd said these references illustrate that the area has been known as the public square since John Lincklaen’s time. “I understand that the name Telephone Park refers to the north side of the square and distinguishes it from the south side, which is sometimes referred to as Cannon Park. The telephone is such a minor part of the furnishings of the park it seems too bad to use it as the name when we have an historic name. The north or south side of the public square is not difficult.”
