Locksmith in
Hoboken, NJ

What makes Hoboken different

Hoboken is one and a quarter square miles carrying more than 48,000 people per square mile, which makes it the densest place we cover by a wide margin. The fabric is masonry rowhouses of three to five storeys, mostly built between the 1850s and the 1930s and later cut into flats, along with converted mills and warehouses and the mid-rise and high-rise condominium along the waterfront. About two-thirds of households rent. Almost nothing here is a detached house with its own front door, so nearly every job starts with the same question: is the door you are calling about your unit door, or the building's door? The answer to that decides who is able to authorise the work.

A tenant does not control the front door of the building. That is worth saying plainly, because it is the thing most people are unclear about. What you control is your own unit door, and what you usually need after moving in is that cylinder rekeyed, so keys issued to previous tenants, their friends and whoever held one for the plumber stop working. Rekeying is also the version a landlord will accept: the lock body stays on the door, nothing is cut, and they get a working key the same day. Check the lease before booking and tell the landlord or managing agent what you are doing. Turnover here is fast, and a surprising number of unit doors have never been rekeyed between tenancies at all.

Plenty of doors in the old stock still carry their original mortise lock bodies, and this is where we part company with most of the trade. The standard move is to pull the mortise out and fit a modern bored lock, because the swap is quicker and the invoice is bigger. It is also permanent. The pocket has to be filled, the stile gets cut, and a hundred-year-old door is worse afterwards. Those mortise cases are usually better made than the thing that replaces them. A case can be taken out, stripped, cleaned, worn springs replaced and the cylinder rekeyed, and it will run better than it has in decades. Mortise work is a speciality that has quietly left the trade. We kept it.

Hoboken's historic districts cover a large share of the older housing, and a street-facing door inside one is not simply yours to swap. The commission's guidelines ask that original doors, frames, transoms and sidelights be kept and repaired rather than replaced, and that intercom panels and mailboxes sit inside the vestibule instead of on the face of the building. Changing the appearance of a street door normally means an application. In practice that points the same way we do anyway: service the door that is already there, put new hardware on the inside face where it cannot be seen from the pavement, and leave the front of the building alone.

If you own in a condominium or a co-op, find out who authorises a change to a unit door before you book anything. Some associations specify how unit doors must look, some require the building to hold a key or a code, some restrict work to contractors with a certificate of insurance on file. All reasonable, and all far easier to settle in advance than with a locksmith standing in your hallway. Anything past your own door, meaning lobby, laundry, package room, bike store and roof, is the association's to instruct rather than yours. And we will talk you out of high-security hardware on every door. Behind a locked street entrance the hardened cylinder belongs on your unit door and nowhere else.