Old City is one of those places where a new lock can be sitting in a very old hole.
You see it all the time around 2nd Street, 3rd Street, Market and Arch. An older building has been renovated inside, the apartment looks completely modern, but the front door has been changed and adjusted in pieces over the years. Maybe the lock is five years old. The door is much older. The strike has obviously been moved before. There is paint around the edge from at least a couple of previous jobs.
None of that is necessarily bad. It just means we do not like guessing from the appearance of the lock.
Fern Rock Hardware - Locksmith Services has been working with locks and door hardware for more than 20 years. Old City gives us plenty of reasons to use that experience. A customer may call about a bad deadbolt and end up having a door-alignment problem. Another may think every lock needs replacing after moving in when the hardware is actually in very good shape.
We would rather figure that out first.
A difficult front-door lock is not always difficult for the same reason.
One useful check is to open the door and turn the deadbolt a few times. Does it feel much easier? If so, the bolt may be meeting the frame poorly once the door is shut. That can happen after a door settles, a hinge loosens or somebody adjusts the strike and gets it almost right.
Old City has plenty of entrances where different pieces of hardware were installed at different times. That is not unusual in an older building. The mistake is assuming the newest part must be the problem simply because that is where the key goes.
We handle the usual residential locksmith work - lockouts, deadbolts, repairs, replacement locks and smart locks - but there are houses and condos where leaving the existing hardware alone is the better job.
An older lock that still works cleanly does not offend us. Neither does a newer one. Condition matters.
Smart locks are a good example. People sometimes buy one because the old deadbolt has become hard to turn. The keypad goes on, everything looks great, and now the little motor is struggling with exactly the same tight spot the old key was struggling with. The electronic part changed. The door did not.
That is the kind of thing worth sorting out before installation.
Old City has condos, apartments, rentals and buildings that have changed occupants many times. Keys follow people around through all of that.
A previous owner gives a spare to a friend. A tenant makes another copy. Somebody doing work on the property has one for a month. Years later the place changes hands and nobody is doing an inventory of every brass key ever cut for it.
When someone moves in, we usually care about the condition of the locks and the history of the keys as two separate questions.
If the hardware is good, there may be no reason to replace it. We can often rekey locks so the old copies no longer operate the door. You keep the lock and start over with new keys.
Multi-unit buildings need a little more attention here. Your unit door may be yours to deal with, while the main entrance or common areas are controlled by the building. We would rather know that before touching anything. A quick conversation with management can prevent a very unnecessary headache.
Businesses have the same key problem in a different form. A shop or office can go through several employees and managers while the front lock keeps working just fine. Eventually somebody asks, "How many people still have a key to this place?"
Sometimes nobody knows.
That is a perfectly good reason to call a commercial locksmith. Nothing has to be broken. The owner may simply want the old keys out of circulation and a cleaner start.
On the other hand, a commercial door that has become hard to lock needs a different look. Old City storefront entrances get opened, closed, pulled and pushed all day. A latch or deadbolt that suddenly needs an extra shove at night may be reacting to the door rather than the key cylinder. We check both.
Getting to the lock is sometimes the easy part. Getting to the door can be less obvious.
An apartment may be several floors above a controlled building entrance. A customer can be standing at the unit while we are downstairs with no way into the lobby. A business may have its usable entrance around the side. A car may be two levels down in a garage instead of on the street where the owner is waiting.
Those are small details, but they are useful ones.
The parking situation matters particularly with a car locksmith call. Tell us the year, make and model of the vehicle and where the vehicle itself is parked. "Near Market Street" may describe where you are standing, but it does not help much if the car is actually underground around the corner.
We also need to know what happened to the key. Locked in the car is different from completely lost. A fob that is still in your hand but will not operate the vehicle is different again. Replacement keys on newer cars may need programming as well as cutting, while a simple lockout is a different job altogether.
If another working key exists, even if it is at home, mention it. That little detail can matter.
And yes, check the passenger doors and hatch before calling about keys locked inside. People laugh when we say that until they find one unlocked.
Some lock problems announce themselves for a while.
The key gets a little rough in January. By March you are pulling the door toward you when you lock it. By summer everybody who lives there knows exactly how much pressure to put on the handle. At that point the problem has basically become part of the house.
Then one day the trick stops working.
That history is useful when you call us. A lock that has been getting worse for six months gives us a different starting point from a perfectly good lock with the keys sitting on the other side of the door.
Our emergency locksmith service covers lockouts and lock problems that cannot reasonably wait. Tell us whether the key is inside, missing, broken or stuck. If a piece snapped off inside the cylinder and you can still see it, leave it alone if possible. Pushing it farther in with a screwdriver usually gives us more work, not less.
A lost key can raise another question after the door is open. Losing one key by itself is annoying. Losing a key together with something that identifies your address may be a reason to change the keying instead of simply making another copy.
There is no automatic answer. It depends on what happened and what is already on the door.
We like Old City because the locksmith work is rarely as uniform as the blocks make it look from a distance. One building may have a carefully preserved entrance. The next has modern condo hardware. A restaurant door gets worked hard every night, while an apartment upstairs may only need a simple rekey after somebody moves in.
That is enough variety without trying to make every call sound complicated.
If you are elsewhere in Philadelphia and reached this page while looking for a local locksmith, our service-area page covers the other neighborhoods and nearby communities we serve.
For Old City, start with the address and what the lock is doing. Tell us if the door has been difficult for a while, if the keys are gone, if you just took possession of the property, or if the vehicle is sitting in a garage somewhere nearby.
Call Fern Rock Hardware - Locksmith Services when you need a locksmith in Old City. We'll figure out the useful part first, then deal with the lock.
