On Ocean Street, an abandoned phone booth found new life as a poetry project. Then it vanished.

On a recent Sunday in late July, an art piece appeared on a stretch of Ocean Street in Santa Cruz, one that came wrapped in a mystery. 

An abandoned phone booth in front of Budget and Avis rental car companies, across from the Paradox Hotel, had been covered in dozens of poems and stickers that appeared to be modified versions of the City of Santa Cruz’s official logo. Across the top of the structure, stickers proclaimed it “The Dead Ocean Phone Booth.” 

Inside, the phone itself had been removed. Instead, there were more than a hundred short poems, each on yellowing index-card-sized stickers that had been meticulously placed corner to corner, covering every inch of the booth’s decaying walls. 

Almost all of the poems opened with the phrase “I called to tell you…” Each depicted a one-sided conversation that often described loss, death, questioning and self-harm. In some, the voice was wistful, in others desperate and pleading. “I called to tell you that 1,000 birds will fly out of my mouth when I die,” read one. Another read: “I called to tell you because you’re the only one who would believe me.”

It didn’t take long for questions about the mysterious phone booth to pop up on a local Santa Cruz Reddit thread. Some praised the quality of the poetry. Others were simply shocked that Santa Cruz still had phone booths. No one seemed to know who was behind the public art project. 

A worker at Avis and Budget Cars said she had no idea who had covered the phone booth in poetry. A manager at the rental agency complained that he’d been trying to get the phone booth removed for years to no avail. 

Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History exhibitions manager Shanti Nagwani was also perplexed by the public art piece, but said she wanted to learn more. 

Richard Smith, a street maintenance field supervisor with the city’s public works department, said the phone booth didn’t fall under the city’s jurisdiction, and instead belonged to AT&T, who didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

No one seemed to recognize the unknown artist, who left no calling card or signature. 

Then Julia Chiapella of the Hive Poetry Collective, a local group of poets, began asking around. 

Chiapella is the co-founder of Santa Cruz Writes and the retired director of the Young Writers Program. She shared the mystery of the phone booth poetry with her community of artists, which included David Allen Sullivan. 

As it happened, Sullivan, the former poet laureate of Santa Cruz County, was one of the collaborators who helped to assemble the piece. The project was the brainchild of Taylor Gorman, a 37-year-old poet and UC Santa Cruz campus library employee who posts his work on Instagram under the username @santacruzflyerdude. 

Gorman moved to Santa Cruz from New Orleans three years ago. A poet since he was a teen, he has a master’s in poetry from Wichita State University and has published some of his works in literary journals like the Cabrillo College’s Porter Gulch Review’s 2023 and 2024 edition, and De Anza college’s 2024 publication the Red Wheelbarrow. 

He also shared his artwork around town, mostly in the Midtown and Seabright areas, often in the form of posters with a satirical or comedic focus on his pets — a one-eyed cat named Valkyrie and a no-eyed cat named Sufi — running for office, or offering a witty, often political remark. 

For Gorman, poetry as a medium has long served as an outlet for processing grief, especially after his beloved cat, Yim, vanished shortly after moving to Santa Cruz. Yim’s disappearance “just kind of broke my heart and crushed me, and I still think about him every day,” Gorman said. “And because of that, I think the grief and the lack of closure comes out in these poems.” He added: “I like that it sort of pushes me a little bit to get these feelings out…It makes sense to me — it doesn’t work any other way.”

The phone booth was a passion project, drawing inspiration from windphones — a type of phone booth that is deliberately disconnected, often with the purpose of allowing visitors to have one-way conversations with deceased loved ones, offering catharsis and reckoning with grief and loss. 

The first windphone phone booth was built in 2010 in Japan after the creator, Itaru Sasak, lost his cousin to cancer. The following year, after it was destroyed in the 2011 tsunami, he rebuilt it, welcoming others mourning the losses of their loved ones. Another windphone was built in Joshua Tree this year, mourning the loss of two teenagers who died in a car accident. 

After two months of planning, Gorman, Sullivan and friend Victoria Bruner, disguised themselves as construction workers — Sullivan’s idea — so they would go unnoticed as they descended upon the abandoned phone booth. Armed with the illusion of authority, they completed the project in two hours.  

Gorman chose this Ocean Street phone booth because it was abandoned. “I wanted to find something that was already broken and didn’t work,” he said. “There’s not too many phone booths like that around here…I didn’t see any others that were as reachable, that were in such a dilapidated state that no one would care about it.”

He also chose the location because it was in a place that would be unexpected and confronting, in between a T-Mobile and a Jack in the Box on Ocean Street. “I didn’t announce anything or try to get attention towards it,” he said. “I was kind of just letting it exist…I didn’t think anyone would say anything at all, and I didn’t think anyone would notice.”

For Gorman, the art project also served as a way to repurpose unused and outdated infrastructure. In an era where cell phones have largely made payphones obsolete, what role did a phone booth, particularly one with no phone, serve in the community? “All it does is collect graffiti and trash,” he said. “Why not make it something better or something interesting that people can see?”

The city licenses 43 signal traffic boxes at traffic intersections to artists to vinyl wrap or paint the boxes, a grant-funded program that started in 2001 and has since ended, though the city may revisit it next year. But this particular phone booth once belonged to Pacific Bell Telephone Company, which has since been bought by AT&T California. Since phone booths don’t fall under city jurisdiction, Smith said, the city can’t license them for artwork or beautification.

The city also has no interest in accepting the responsibility or liability for equipment it doesn’t own, Smith added. Learning that the abandoned phone booth had been covered in what he described as graffiti, Smith said he would call to have the Dead Ocean Phone Booth removed.  

“If someone cuts themselves or somehow gets hurt while standing or interacting with the equipment, AT&T could be held responsible,” he said in an email last week. 

Each evening for the week after putting up the Dead Ocean phone booth, Gorman returned to his art project to take photos of the daily changes and make minor repairs: replacing unreadable stickers, yellowed from the sun, and tidying up the space. He always left a few magnets bearing the phone booth’s logo, only to find the magnets had disappeared when he returned the next day. 

“I initially just wanted it to let it sit and fall apart,” he said of the phone booth on Wednesday. “But now I feel kind of connected to it, and I wanted to stay up for a week or two until it can kind of start decaying,” 

“When I think it’s done and fully dead, probably within a month, I will take it all down, and it’ll be as if it was never there at all.” He added: “I also think maybe the city will take it down before I can.” 

Last Friday, Gorman’s prediction came true. He returned to the art project for his daily routine, only to find that the phone booth was gone. AT&T and the city did not respond by publication time to Lookout’s request to confirm whether either organization had been involved in removing the phone booth. 

Gorman decorated the unmarked spot where the Dead Ocean Phone Booth once stood with candles, a headstone bearing a poem and a clipboard with the words: “Here lies a dead ocean.” 

He is already on the lookout for his next project, which will bring a new function and beauty to public spaces. He has his eye on another dilapidated phone booth on River Street in front of the long closed Outdoor World Sporting Goods — if he can get there before the city does.

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