Apartment and co-op lockouts
Door shut behind you, keys on the kitchen counter. We open it and, where the board or managing agent requires it, work with building staff on the paperwork side.
Upper West Side · 24/7 lockouts
Call the shop. A licensed Basics Plus locksmith gets sent from our Broadway storefront at 83rd Street, opens your door, and rekeys it on the spot if your keys are gone for good.
Serving the Upper West Side, Lincoln Square, Manhattan Valley, Morningside Heights, Columbus Circle, the Harlem edge, and across the park to the Upper East Side.
The faster we know what we are walking into, the faster the right tools come with the locksmith. Thirty seconds on the phone saves a second trip.
Broadway and 92nd reads very differently than Riverside and 110th. Give us the corner and the building number.
Apartment door, building front door, office, or a rolling gate on the avenue. Pre-war mortise locks need different tools than a modern cylinder.
In a doorman or co-op building, tell us who we check in with. In a walk-up, tell us the floor and whether the vestibule door is locked too.
A snapped key inside the cylinder is an extraction job. Say so on the phone and the extraction kit and a blank come with us.
No riddles, no call center, no surprise number once the door is open.
Call 212-510-8320From our own storefront, not a subcontractor pulled off an app. You are told who is coming and roughly how long the run uptown will take.
The locksmith looks at the lock, tells you what the job is, and quotes it. If you want to think about it, nothing gets touched.
Picking and non-destructive entry first, always. Drilling is the last resort on a seized or high-security cylinder, and you hear about it before it happens.
Lost keys in a cab or a stolen bag means the lock should not stay as it is. We rekey the cylinder and cut you a fresh set. More on that on our apartment rekeying page.
Search "locksmith near me" at two in the morning and most of what comes back is a call center that sells your job to whoever answers. That is how people end up with a drilled lock and a bill nobody quoted.
Basics Plus has had storefront locations in Manhattan since 1988. You can walk into the shop the next morning and speak to the same people.
Old buildings, heavy doors, and hardware that has been in the frame since before the tenant was born. We know these locks.
Door shut behind you, keys on the kitchen counter. We open it and, where the board or managing agent requires it, work with building staff on the paperwork side.
Common all over the West Side. Old mortise bodies are worn and stubborn. We open them carefully and can replace the cylinder or the whole body if it is past saving.
Vestibule and lobby doors, panic hardware, and intercom-release strikes for supers and managing agents who need a door back in service tonight.
Rolling gates and shop doors on Broadway, Amsterdam and Columbus. A gate that will not open at 6am costs you the whole day, so we treat it as an emergency.
Key snapped in the cylinder. We pull the broken half, check whether the cylinder survived, and cut you a fresh key from the remaining piece or the keyway.
Keys stolen or missing with your address attached. We rekey the cylinder while we are there and hand you a new set before we leave.
Dispatch comes out of Basics Plus On Broadway, 2315 Broadway at 83rd Street, which keeps the uptown runs short. Midtown East and Union Square jobs go out of those shops instead.
Still standing there. Call and ask anything else: 212-510-8320.
It depends on traffic, the time of night, and how many jobs are already out. When you call we tell you honestly what the run uptown looks like right then, instead of promising a number we cannot keep.
Yes. We need to see that you belong on the other side of that door: ID with the address, a lease, a piece of mail, or confirmation from the doorman or super. If your ID is locked inside, tell us on the phone and we will sort out what works.
Our first move is always non-destructive entry, which leaves the frame and the door alone. Some seized or high-security cylinders have to be drilled and replaced. If that is the case, the locksmith explains it and quotes the replacement before touching the lock.
In most cases yes. If your keys are lost or stolen we rekey the cylinder on the visit and cut new keys so the old ones stop working. For a whole apartment or a building line, see apartment rekeying.
Constantly. We are licensed and insured, we check in at the desk, and we can provide a certificate of insurance when the managing agent asks for one. Tell us the building rules when you call so nothing holds us up in the lobby.
The form below is for anything that can wait: a rekey appointment, new keys for a tenant, a gate lock that is getting sticky. For a door you are standing in front of, the phone is faster.
Call 212-510-8320