Ryan Green stands proudly, gazing at an old phone booth in his Los Angeles home driveway. To him, this empty box, now missing the actual phone it once housed, is a thing of beauty, a sight to behold, even if it is worse for the wear. 

He rubs his hand over the treasure. 

"I like that it's weather-worn. It has rust," Green said. "It has graffiti. It has stickers." 

Green was driving down the street one day and saw a crew unmooring a pay phone from a sidewalk. They were decommissioning the booth, and Green asked if he could take it. The dismantling crew said "yes." He threw it in the back of his trunk and drove off. 

He has no intention of refurbishing it, he said. 

"It is a perfect representation of what you would find out on a street corner," Green said. "This is what a pay phone looks like. It is what it is."

An artist and filmmaker, Green is bewitched by booths as they are ghosts from his past.

"It's part of my life that died," Green said. 

For Green, pay phones are personal. They remind him of his youth, when, while he was running around town in a pre-cell phone era, he relied on public phones to keep in touch. And he is nostalgic about them. 

"I don't see a lot of people singing the praises of pay phones, and yet they've played an essential role in our society," Green said. "And these things are disappearing everywhere you look."

And he looks everywhere. Green goes on regular "pay phone hunts." For the past three years, he has been driving all over Los Angeles, his eyes peeled for pay phones. 

Driving down the street, and during a recent hunt, Green points out the passenger side window. "Here's one right there!" Green shouts. He takes a picture of every phone booth he encounters and then dutifully documents them on his social media and websites. His goal is to capture every single pay phone in L.A. County before they all disappear.

There is no accurate pay phone census. But Green believes there were once "tens of thousands" of them in the Los Angeles area. While it held a telecommunications monopoly, AT&T owned all of the payphones. When Ma Bell was split up in the 1980s, she lost her grip on phone booths. Many private companies got into the pay phone business. Over time, as more and more people relied on their cellular phones, public phones became obsolete. When they broke down, often no one came out to repair them. They were abandoned. 

And Green said he is in a hurry to preserve this history because pay phones are perishing. 

"It's gone!" Green said, pointing to a spot where he snapped a pay phone photo just a few months ago. As he drives farther down the street, he counts three more phones that have disappeared and in a short time. "And we've only been driving for five minutes!" Green adds.

Ironically, to preserve pay phones for posterity, Green uses the same technology that made pay phones obsolete in the first place. He records the images on his smartphone. 

Green insists every phone tells a story. 

"It's literally carrying the DNA of the individuals who have touched it and interacted with it over years and decades," Green said, just before he snaps a photo of a decrepit booth, rusted and missing the handset. 

"I just capture an image, in the state that it's in, on the date that I am there," Green explains.

 But it all begs the obvious question: Why does he do this?

"I ask myself that every single day," Green said, squatting down with his iPhone to get just the right angle of an old payphone in front of a liquor store. 

"I think if you are an artist of any kind, it's a question you cannot answer," Green explains. "It's inside of you. It's something personal. I don't know if I'd be paying attention to pay phones at all if I didn't have personal memories.

And he does have a very personal pay phone memory.

Green drives to a significant, yet, nondescript spot not far from his home at the end of a hunt. It's on a sidewalk outside a convenience store. Green remembers driving by this place with his father about 20 years. He looked out the window and saw his uncle standing at a booth, talking on the phone. It just so happened that would be the last time Green would see his Uncle Larry before his untimely death.

The pay phone is long gone. And it frustrates him that he can't find the exact place where that booth stood on the sidewalk. But then, he has a eureka moment.

"Oh my God! It was right here. Those were the posts!" Green said as he points to the sawed-off bolts that anchored the phone booth into the concrete. "That's exciting!"

Green pauses for a moment while he gazes down at the sidewalk. 

"His feet would have been right here," Green said.

The phone is gone. But the memory is still there. Green is preserving a memory for all of us. A memory of a time when you didn't have to worry if your cell phone battery was about to die or fret about how many signal bars you had. As long as you had a quarter in your pocket, you were good to go.