Lift the receiver and a dead man’s world answers: a party, a holiday dinner, a song, a comedian he loved. Hang up, pick up, and it is something else.
Nicholas Bennett Weerts died unexpectedly on February 1, 2017. He had, in his family’s words, “an odd fascination with payphones.” Nine years later there is one at 209 Corry Street on Madison’s East Side: a silver booth with TELEPHONE across the top, red panels inside and a real coin payphone on the wall, its coin slot and collect-call stickers still in place. It stands in a front garden among hostas and two red toadstool ornaments, and it was opened with a public ribbon cutting on September 13.
Pick it up and the phone chooses at random from more than ten hours of audio: conversations with friends and family, parties, holiday gatherings, music, everyday moments, and, less expected, full-length films and the comedy of Nick’s favorite comedians. Nothing tells you what is coming. The site’s instructions are three words: pick up, listen, come back.
The booth’s own framing is the one to keep. Japan’s wind phones are disconnected telephones for speaking to the dead; this one “works somewhat in reverse,” and you listen instead. It is also not built only for the people who knew him. The media release says the booth “belongs to the neighborhood,” and the hope it states is plain: that someone walking past might stop, pick up, and “discover something they weren’t expecting.”
The website carries the rest of him. Nine of his strawberry drawings are posted there, each face with its own mood. There is a free browser game, Somewhere on the Line, in which you play Nick walking Corry Street in 16-bit pixel art and meeting the neighbors. A public message board takes memories and hellos.
What to know: the booth is outdoors at a street address, with no hours posted and no cost; donations go through Venmo (@NWMPB). Public audio contributions are planned but not open yet — “details will be shared as the project develops” — so for now every clip comes from the family’s collection. It is ten days old. One visit hears a fraction of ten hours; the booth is built for coming back.