You may not know it, but there was a time when phones weren't something people constantly stared at; a bygone era where people used them to actually (gasp) talk to one another. In fact, some of them actually had small structures around them to create privacy and eliminate noise during said non-text conversations.
One of these contraptions, antique phone and all, is something of a centerpiece in the lobby of downtown St. Pete's Hollander Hotel, a hip boutique hotel that's home to a popular watering hole. It gets a lot of attention from tourists who are curious about what the hell it is.
“It's a conversation piece,” said Nick Herring, the hotel's general manager. “It gets a lot of attention. People love it. They want to get their pictures taken inside of it. They want more information about it.”
The 80-year-old wooden phone booth, which stands a few feet from the hotel's front desk, is will be featured on the History Channel reality show Museum Men Saturday at 8 p.m..
Herring said location scouts from the cable channel had dinner and drinks there while looking for places to film in the area, and they actually approached him about about filming part of the show in the hotel, and asked if the hotel could use any antique pieces.
Herring said having an antique phone booth around a similarly antique phone, which staff and guests are actually able to use, would make sense. So the show's producers went out and found one — Herring said he's not sure where — and got to work putting it together in the lobby late last summer.
“They had to reassemble it here on site," he said. "On the episode, it shows how they reassembled everything, put it all together and all that fun stuff.”
This article appears in Jan 22-28, 2015.