You think rent for your apartment is steep? This “co-working space” was listed for $300 a month!
Phone booths, a relic of a time gone by, still exist all around the city. While their advanced older brother the Link Wifi System is slowly taking over their spot, there are plenty of these eye sores taking up valuable sidewalk space today. The modern use for a phone booth is a special mix between ad space and a depository for vomit and other bodily…wastes… so, with all that in mind, Improve Everywhere– a comedy collective dedicated to staging unexpected performances throughout the city- put on an unauthorized stunt highlighting the ridiculousness of the amount of underutilized phone booths and hefty rent prices.
According to their website, they chose a booth located on 6th Avenue and 24th Street in front of a vacant retail space to avoid making to much of a disturbance. It was also across from a Starbucks (where they got their wifi from). With the help from their team they changed something similar to this:
to this:
Apparently, the inspiration for the stunt came from the first photo. On their website, Improve Everywhere explains that,
“Agent Deanna Director stumbled across a phone booth in Chinatown that had a discarded office chair sitting inside. She sent us the photo and wrote, ‘With the surge of WeWorks popping up everywhere, it only makes sense for them to expand to every corner of Manhattan. What if we re-branded the telephone booths to look like mini WeWork office spaces?’ WeWork is indeed popping up everywhere. They recently became the largest private office tenant in New York City, passing JP Morgan Chase, and they’ve expanded into housing (WeLive) and bodegas (WeMRKT). The next logical step is obviously phone booths.”
The implementation of the joke was almost too good to be true. Make sure to check it out for yourself in this hysterical video:
And take a look at some additional photos from the take over below:
Featured image and all photos: Improve Everywhere