Nevada

Payphones were once everywhere, but now just a few are left in Las Vegas

Published

2 years ago

September 9, 2024

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Payphones were once everywhere, but now just a few are left in Las Vegas

They were once on street corners, at bus stops, in convenience stores, courthouses and casinos.

In the pre-cell phone era, everyone from executives to children to criminals used them.

But the golden age of the payphone ended many years ago as cell phones took hold, becoming ubiquitous and affordable.

Today, few remain and even fewer are in use. A recent Las Vegas Review-Journal search for payphones in the Las Vegas area found five: one at Centennial Hills Hospital, another at the Clark County detention center, two at Jerry’s Nugget and one on display at the Mob Museum.

Early history

The first time the phrase “pay phone” appeared in the Review-Journal, at least according to the digitally searchable archives, was February 12, 1931.

The story was a brief about a pay phone stolen by thieves “evidently bent upon taking from it whatever money there might be in the machine.” It ran under a photo of a remodeled gas station and next to an article about a peddler of a “narcotic weed” called “marihuana.”

The payphone’s history stretches back to 1889, when the first one was installed on a corner in Hartford, Connecticut after being invented by William Gray.

Ron Knappen, who wrote a book about payphone history and owns a Wisconsin-based company called Phoneco that sells payphones to customers like a prop company and a museum, said early payphones were bulky wooden machines called “pay stations.” In rural areas, people might have to turn a crank to contact the operator.

A call cost a nickel in the 1910s and 20s, he said, increased to a dime in about 1940 and eventually jumped to a quarter.

The survivors

At Centennial Hills Hospital, there’s still a payphone near the emergency department. A four minute call costs $1, which one can pay with coins or a credit card.

Hospital spokeswoman Gretchen Papez said its intended users include people who don’t have cell phones or whose phone batteries have died. The phone is owned by WiMacTel, which didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Officer Robert Wicks, a Metropolitan Police Department spokesperson, said the Clark County detention center has a non-working payphone in the booking area.

Next to the restrooms at Jerry’s Nugget Casino in North Las Vegas, there’s a payphone that’s missing its receiver and has an out-of-order sticker covering part of the coin slot. A second payphone in an entryway appears to be in better shape, but no longer has a dial tone. A WiMacTel label advertises local calls at a rate of 50 cents for 15 minutes.

Martha Diaz, a casino manager, can remember when people made calls on the phones frequently, but said she hasn’t seen someone use them in about eight or nine years.

But at the Mob Museum, a payphone is still a popular attraction.

The museum has a phone booth that was once in the Four Deuces, the Chicago headquarters of Al Capone, said Claire White, the museum’s director of education. The museum acquired it from a collector in 2019 for an amount she said she could not disclose. The booth contains a 1920s payphone, but not the original one.

“There’s always been a connection between payphones and organized crime,” White said. Using a payphone was a way to avoid wiretapping, she said.

Most of the museum’s artifacts are behind glass, but visitors are allowed to get in the booth and open and close the door.

“It’s definitely one of the most unique artifacts we have on display,” she said.

It’s also one of the museum’s most popular sites for photos.

Big business

Before they were relics of the pre-digital age, payphones were lucrative.

“They made obscene amounts of money and then all of a sudden, they didn’t,” said Las Vegas attorney Robert Bolick, who represented a payphone company called Pay Phones of Nevada.

Gregory Balelo, who is still listed as an officer of a company called Interwest Payphone in state records, said his small company once had about 150 to 200 payphones, mostly in indoor locations like casinos, taverns and convenience stores. Interwest was incorporated in 1987.

Most of its income came from casinos, he said, but business was also good in the employee areas of hotels and in sportsbooks. Long distance calls were lucrative too.

The business began declining around 2000 as cell phones became cheaper and more reliable. He got rid of his last payphone in about 2008 and thinks it was probably at the South Point.

“It was part of my life for a long time and it was very good to me,” Balelo said of the payphone business.

And payphones can still inspire nostalgia.

Posters on Las Vegas Reddit threads have attempted to track down payphones and share sitings. Some of the suggestions for where a person might find payphones are tongue-in-cheek: “in jail” or “Back in the 1990s.”

Balelo said he still has some payphones that he hasn’t scrapped and recently found some handsets in storage.

“I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away,” he said.

Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com, especially if you know of a payphone we missed. Follow @BrighamNoble on X.

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Nevada

Best Nevada high schools for athletes? One study has revealed a top 25

Published

44 minutes ago

May 15, 2026

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Best Nevada high schools for athletes? One study has revealed a top 25

Nevada has a rich history of producing athletic legends.

Total number of sports: 24

1. Bishop Gorman (Las Vegas)

Total number of sports: 14

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Nevada

Nevada designates more than 119,000 voters inactive

Published

13 hours ago

May 14, 2026

Press Room

Nevada designates more than 119,000 voters inactive

CARSON CITY, Nev. (KOLO) – The State of Nevada says it has designated more than 119,000 voters as inactive ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar says that in the spring of this year, counties updated 14,164 voter records, designated 119,533 voters as inactive and canceled the voter registrations of 7,583 people.

This is in addition to 2025 voter roll maintenance efforts that registered more than 138,000 voters inactive and canceled nearly 177,000 voter registrations.

“State and local election officials are working hard to prepare voters for the upcoming June Primary, and keeping Nevada’s voter rolls up to date is a critical part of that process. County election officials have dedicated significant resources to make sure Nevada’s voter registration records are accurate, so that all eligible Nevadans – and only eligible Nevadans – can cast a ballot,” said Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar. “Mail ballots are being sent to active, registered voters across the state now. Voters can support their local officials’ work by checking and updating their registration information on VOTE.NV.gov.”

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Nevada

Arbor View beats rival Centennial for 5A boys volleyball state title

Published

1 day ago

May 14, 2026

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Arbor View beats rival Centennial for 5A boys volleyball state title

The Arbor View boys volleyball team has embodied the mindset that it would take the efforts of all 16 players to win the school its first boys volleyball title.

It proved to be the case on Wednesday night against rival Centennial in the Class 5A state championship match, and the Aggies’ efforts all season showed up in the biggest game of the season.

No. 3-seeded Arbor View claimed its first boys volleyball title with a 25-20, 25-27, 25-19, 25-19 victory over top-seeded Centennial at Sunrise Mountain.

“It feels amazing. The boys have worked hard, I don’t even know if I could put it into words,” Arbor View coach Nicole Adarme said. “Our big goal was to stay calm and collected the entire time. I just wanted to reflect that for them.”

Arbor View (28-13-1) let its emotions out after the final point on an Owen Wenger kill. The Aggies huddled and jumped for joy, helped carry injured teammate Gunnar Robinson off the bench, and eventually moved the celebration into the stands with a sea of red from the Arbor View student section.

“It feels absolutely great,” junior middle blocker/outside hitter Risden Miller said. “We trust each other so much. We’re best friends in and out of volleyball, and that really helps us on the court with just competing as a team.”

Even though the two team’s previous meeting on April 14 was a three-set win in league play by Centennial (32-6), Adarme said she knew the fourth meeting of the season for the two northwest rivals wasn’t going to be a sweep on either side.

Arbor View won a back-and-forth first set on a kill from Miller. Then it looked like the Aggies were going to win a close second set, but Centennial got a point for Arbor View being out of rotation, and the Bulldogs won four of the last five points to even the match score to one set apiece.

“That’s the traditional thing (when we play) Centennial (to play long matches), so for us, we just treated it like another set,” Adarme said. “We knew they were going to fight, so how do we respond to that? Our constant conversation was responding to the negative and moving forward in a positive direction.”

Arbor View scored six straight points in the third set to take a 20-15 lead, and the Aggies never let up to get to the fourth set with a chance to win the title. The Aggies took advantage of several Centennial errors to take the lead in the third set on their way to the title.

“We took three deep breaths and reset and recollected ourselves as a team,” Miller said of closing out the final two sets. “That’s just completely huge for rebounding from a lost set.

“For me, personally, just looking at all my best friends on the court, that truly calms me down and I know it calms them down as well.”

Miller recorded 18 kills and Wenger was key at the net with eight kills and eight blocks. The Aggies also got contributions from Graham Blanchard, Kenyon Wickliffe and Robinson before he went down with a lower left leg injury in the fourth set.

Lincoln Larson led Centennial with 19 kills. It’s the first boys volleyball state title for Arbor View and first appearance in the title game after the program reached the state semifinals four previous times.

“We can’t (win) with six, we have to do it with all 16,” Adarme said. “We’ve been training all of them to be ready for big moments and it was an amazing moment for Cooper (Ball, coming in for an injured Robinson) to be able to come in for us.

“We just had to know we couldn’t be outside of ourselves. Where we fell short in the past was trying to be more instead of focusing on what our role is and what our job is.”

Contact Alex Wright at awright@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AlexWright1028 on X.

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