Northwest DC
Lock work in upper Northwest, where the shop is
Kennedy Street is home ground. Petworth, Brightwood, Manor Park, Columbia Heights and 16th Street Heights are a few minutes away, and the housing there throws up the same handful of problems again and again.
What the houses here are made of
The stretch between Kennedy Street and Grant Circle is largely brick row houses from the 1910s to the 1930s, most with a front porch and a small yard, many with an alley garage behind. Further west, 16th Street Heights shifts toward detached and semi-detached houses with driveways and side entrances. Columbia Heights adds larger apartment blocks and a lot of condominium conversions.
What ties them together is age. A 1925 door frame has spent a century absorbing Washington summers, and it is not the shape it started as. Locks fitted into it were made when hardware was heavier and serviceable, which is genuinely good news: a great deal of it can be repaired rather than replaced.
The English basement problem
A large share of houses in this part of the city have a basement apartment with its own entrance under the front steps or at the side. That door is below grade, catches run-off, and sits in the dampest part of the building. Its hardware fails years before the front door's does — corroded cylinders, latches that stiffen every August, strike plates rusted into the frame.
It also raises a question the main house does not: who holds keys to what. If the basement is rented and the main house is not, the two should generally be on separate keys, and the interior connecting door — if there is one — needs to actually lock. Sorting that out is normally a rekeying job rather than new hardware.
Jobs that come up most in Northwest
- Keying a house alike after decades of additions. Front door, back door, basement, garage and gate, fitted by five different people. One key is usually achievable without replacing anything.
- Doors that stopped latching in July. Humidity swells the slab, the latch stops meeting the pocket, and by October it works again. Fixing the strike rather than the lock is the durable answer.
- Rekeying after a purchase. Houses here change hands with long histories of tenants and contractors behind them.
- Alley garage and shed hardware. Padlocks and hasps that have been exposed to weather for twenty years.
Working on these streets
Residential permit parking runs across most of the area, and street cleaning days can take a whole side of the block out of use. If you have a driveway or an alley space, mention it. Kennedy Street, Georgia Avenue and 14th Street all have loading restrictions that change through the day.
Georgia Avenue and the Kennedy Street corridor also mean this is where a lot of our small business work happens: corner shops, salons, restaurants and offices above them, mostly with aluminum storefront doors and mortise hardware that runs all day.
Neighboring areas
Where Northwest hands over
North Capitol Street is a few hundred feet from the shop door, so a job that looks like Northwest is often Northeast by the time it has an address on it. Riggs Park, Fort Totten and Michigan Park sit just over the line.
South of Columbia Heights the housing tightens up toward Shaw and Logan Circle, and the work shifts toward condominium units and ground-floor commercial. Down on the far side of the Mall, Capitol Hill is a different age of building again.
Questions and answers
Questions about Northwest
You are on Kennedy Street. Does that make you quicker to this part of town?
It makes the travel shorter, which is worth something. It does not mean we promise a time on the doorstep, because the honest answer depends on where the van already is. Ask when you call and you will get a realistic window rather than a slogan.
Can old mortise locks in these houses be kept?
Frequently. The cases were built to be opened and serviced, and worn parts can often be replaced or the cylinder rekeyed while the original hardware stays on the door. Where a case is cracked or a part is no longer made, we will say so and talk through what fits the pocket.
My basement apartment and the main house have separate tenants. How should the keys work?
Usually as two independent sets, with any connecting door genuinely locked rather than just closed. Where you also want one key that opens both for the owner, that is a small master key arrangement and worth planning before anything is pinned.
Do you cover Columbia Heights and 16th Street Heights as well as Petworth?
Yes. They are all within a short run of the shop. The buildings differ — more apartment stock in Columbia Heights, more detached houses west of 16th — but the work is the same trade.
Keep reading
Services people in Northwest ask for
The three below account for most of the work on these streets, and each page explains what the visit actually involves.
A short run from the shop
Give the block and the nearest cross street, and we can tell you what the job is likely to involve before anyone sets off.