The Nick Weerts Memorial Phone Booth in Madison, Wisconsin

There is a phone booth on Madison’s East Side where picking up the receiver connects the caller to no one—and, in a way, to quite a lot of people. The Nick Weerts Memorial Phone Booth was created in memory of Nicholas Bennett Weerts, who died unexpectedly in 2017. Among his various interests was an oddly persistent fascination with payphones, which nearly a decade after his death provided the inspiration for an unusual memorial. Lift the receiver and the phone comes to life, randomly selecting from more than ten hours of recorded sound. One call might produce a conversation among friends; the next could be music, a family gathering, a comedy routine, a party, or an utterly ordinary moment recorded years ago. Hang up, pick up again, and the experience begins anew. The idea bears some resemblance to Japan’s “wind phones”—unconnected telephones where visitors symbolically speak to loved ones who have died—but the phone booth on Corry Street reverses the conversation. Here, the visitor doesn’t speak to the past. The past speaks back. And it isn’t intended to remain exclusively an archive of one person’s life. The booth was conceived as an evolving community art installation, with visitors eventually able to contribute recordings of their own. Over time, the collection may become as much an accidental audio portrait of its Madison neighborhood as a memorial to the person who inspired it. There is no correct way to experience the phone booth and no way to know what will be waiting on the other end of the line. Just pick up the receiver and listen.

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