In the fishing village of Carrabelle, on Florida’s Panhandle coast, the police department operates out of a phone booth. This is not a figure of speech.
The story of how it got there is exactly the kind of practical, unglamorous problem-solving that produces accidental landmarks. Around 1963, a local officer — often identified as Johnnie Mirabella — was dealing with two irritants that any small-town cop would recognize immediately. Tourists kept using the police line, tying up calls that were supposed to be for official business. And officers writing reports or waiting for calls in the Florida Panhandle heat and rain had nowhere to stand that wasn’t miserable.
The solution was a phone booth. Mirabella moved the department’s phone into an old booth and set it beside Highway 98, where officers could take calls in something resembling shelter, write reports on a surface that wasn’t their knee, and keep an eye on the road at the same time. It worked. The world’s smallest police station was operational.
What Happened to It
A phone booth on a Florida highway lives a difficult life. Over the decades, the Carrabelle station was shot at, knocked over, and battered by at least one hurricane. At some point someone attempted to steal it outright, which is either a crime or a tribute depending on how you look at it.
The original booth survived all of it and eventually retired with some dignity — it now sits in the Carrabelle History Museum, where it can be appreciated without further weather damage. The booth currently standing beside US 98 is a replica, positioned where the original stood so that the tradition and the location remain intact even if the hardware has been replaced.
Carrabelle Itself
The phone booth is the most photographed thing in Carrabelle, but the town it represents is worth a moment of attention on its own terms. This is old Florida Panhandle — a working fishing village on the Apalachicola Bay, the kind of place that hasn’t been fully discovered or fully developed, where the pace is slower and the seafood is fresh and the landscape still looks something like it did before the rest of the coast got built up.
The stretch of US 98 through this part of the Panhandle is one of the better drives in Florida — the road runs close to the Gulf, through fishing communities and longleaf pine forests and past the kind of roadside Florida that’s getting harder to find. Carrabelle sits in the middle of it, small and unhurried, with a phone booth by the highway that has somehow outlasted everything thrown at it.
Blink and you’ll miss it. Don’t blink.
