These are the questions Bath Beach owners, tenants, boards and shopkeepers actually bring to us, grouped by the kind of building they come from. Several started as posts on Brooklyn forums. Each is answered here in full and not repeated in the FAQ further down.
Houses with two or three households
Our 1930s house on a Bay street has an intercom, but the front door has never had a release, and someone once told us there is no system that can buzz this door open. Is that true?
Almost never. What is usually true is that the intercom you have was installed without a release, or with one on a door that was later replaced, and adding it means work at the door as well as in the walls. Any door that latches can take an electric release: a strike cut into the frame where the latch meets it, or, on some doors, an electrified lock. The work is a strike body sized for your frame, a power supply, a pair of wires from the strike to the system and a release button or function at each household. On a wood frame in an older Bath Beach house the strike goes into a pocket cut in the jamb; on a steel frame it needs a strike made for steel.
The bigger question is whether to add a release to the old intercom or replace both together. If the existing intercom talks clearly to every floor and its wiring tests well, adding a release to it can be the cheaper job. If it is already patchy, a new system with the release built in usually costs less over the next few years than repairing the old one and adding a strike to it.
Our street door is a pair of glass-paneled double doors. Where does the release go, and does it still work if only one door opens?
On double doors, one leaf is normally fixed with bolts at the top and bottom and the other is the active leaf that people use every day. The release goes where the active leaf's latch meets either the fixed leaf or the frame. Where the active leaf latches into the fixed leaf, the strike has to fit into the edge of that fixed door, which is the "cut a channel in the doors" work one Brownstoner poster described, and the wire has to reach it through a flexible loop or a hinge with wiring inside. Where the doors have glass panels, we keep every hole and channel in the wood and away from the glass.
The fixed leaf stays bolted, so a buzzer only ever releases the active one. If you need both leaves open, for moving furniture for example, that is done with the bolts, as it is today. What we check closely on double doors is that the active leaf closes fully against the fixed one every time; older double doors often sag, and a sagging door that rubs will not relatch after a release.
A contractor quoted $2,000 to replace the buzzer system in our three-family. How can we tell whether that is a fair number?
By asking what it includes. A fair replacement quote for a three-family should name the street station and how many buttons it has, the answering unit for each household and whether it is audio or video, the door release and its power supply, whether the existing wires will be reused or replaced, and what happens if a reused wire fails its test. A quote that only says "replace intercom system" leaves the costly part, the wiring, undefined. On our Brooklyn ranges, an audio system with a release for a small house is about $400 to $900 and a video system about $700 to $1,800, with the wiring condition pushing a job toward one end or the other.
The Brownstoner owner who asked this exact question had been told that fault-finding would cost about the same as replacing, at $150 an hour with a three-hour minimum. That can be true when every household's line is failing. It is not true when one line has a single bad joint. The way to know is a wire test, which is why we test before we price a replacement.
Our house has one street door and two families, and both doorbells ring in the downstairs hall. Can each button ring only its own floor?
Yes, and it is one of the simplest jobs on this page. In many two-family houses the two buttons were wired to one transformer and one chime, or to two chimes mounted side by side in the ground-floor hall. Separating them means a wire from each button to its own household's chime or answering unit. In a house with a cellar the second household's run usually goes down through the floor, along the cellar ceiling and up inside a wall or closet near that household's door.
If you are going to all that trouble, it is worth deciding at the same time whether the upstairs household should be able to talk to the door and release it. Running a cable capable of carrying an intercom and a release costs little more in labor than running a bell wire, and it saves doing the job twice.
We are converting our one-family into a legal two-family with the Buildings Department. At what point in the job should the buzzer wiring go in?
While the walls are open. The cheapest moment to run entry cable in a Bath Beach house is when the plasterer or the drywall crew has not yet closed the stair walls and the cellar ceiling is still bare. We run the cable from the street door to both households and leave it coiled at each location, labeled, and then come back to install the station and the answering units once the painting is done. Tell your general contractor early, so the framing at the door and at each household is left accessible.
There is one more reason to do it during a conversion. Bath Beach is in a part of Brooklyn where local officials have spent years pressing the city on illegal conversions; the Brooklyn Eagle reported in 2019 that the Buildings Department received 5,411 Brooklyn complaints of suspected illegal conversions in 2018. A legal conversion with a proper door, a release and one button per household is the kind of front entrance an inspector expects to see in a two-family, and it is much harder to retrofit neatly afterwards.
Apartment buildings and co-ops
Our building went up in the 1940s and has never had an intercom. Most of the tenants want one. What can we actually ask for?
If the building has eight or more apartments and predates 1968, Multiple Dwelling Law §50-a gives tenants a specific right: when tenants occupying a majority of the apartments request it in writing, the owner must install a self-locking front door and an intercom that lets tenants talk to visitors and release the door, with work begun within 90 days and finished within six months. The tenants pay for it under that section. The request has to come from a majority of apartments, not a majority of the people who show up to a meeting, so the practical first step is collecting signatures from each apartment.
What tenants usually want from us at that stage is a written quote the owner can see, so the conversation is about a real number. We write it for the owner of record, because the owner controls the door and the walls, and we can quote both an audio system and a video system so the tenants know what they are signing up to pay.
Our building became a co-op years after it was built as a rental walk-up. Who pays for a new entry system, the board or the individual shareholders?
In most co-ops the street door, the station, the wiring in the common halls and the power supply are the corporation's to maintain, and their cost is shared through maintenance or an assessment. The answering unit inside each apartment is a gray area that the proprietary lease decides. Habitat's 2024 article quoted the lawyer Nancy Kourland saying a co-op covered by §50-a "has a legal obligation to repair or replace the intercom," and the lawyer Andrew Freedland pointing out that, depending on the lease or an alteration agreement, a shareholder whose renovation damaged the line may be responsible for that part.
For a Bath Beach co-op that was a rental walk-up, it also helps to check the conversion date. §50-a covers buildings "built or converted after January 1, 1968," so a post-1968 conversion with eight or more apartments falls under the requirement even if the brick is older. We write co-op quotes with the common-area work and the per-apartment equipment on separate lines so the board can split them however its lease requires.
Our newer building on Bay Parkway came with a video intercom from the developer. Can we add phones, apartments or a second door to it without replacing it?
Usually, yes, if we can get into its administration. Bay Vista at 8629 Bay Parkway, finished in 2016, lists a video intercom, and many of the newer buildings around it have similar systems. Adding residents' phones, adding apartments to the directory, putting a second entrance on the same system or tying a side or garage door into the release are all normal additions. The deciding question is who holds the administrator account. Some systems can be managed locally from the station or a computer on site; others are managed through an online account the original installer set up. Find out which one you have, and find any paperwork the developer left, before calling anyone.
If the account cannot be recovered, the manufacturer can sometimes transfer it to the board with proof of ownership. If it cannot, and the system cannot be expanded without it, we quote a replacement station and directory that the board will own outright, reusing the wiring the developer ran.
Packages and the vestibule
Our walk-up has mailboxes in the outer vestibule and the stairs right behind the inner door. Where should the door station, the parcels and the locks each go?
Think of it as two locked doors with a room between them. The door station goes outside the street door, at a reachable height and with lit buttons. The street door gets the release, so residents can let a courier into the vestibule. The vestibule holds the mailboxes and a parcel shelf, ideally with a camera that sees them. The inner door to the stairs keeps its own lock, opened by residents' keys or fobs and, if the building wants, by the same entry system for guests a resident has seen.
If the mailboxes are in an outer area the carrier reaches without a key today, moving them behind a locked door means arranging carrier access with the local post office first. That is not something an entry contractor should change on its own, and it is worth sorting out before the wiring starts.
Mail theft keeps coming up at community meetings in south Brooklyn. Does a new entry system do anything for our mailboxes?
Indirectly. When Assemblymember William Colton spoke about mail and identity theft in Bath Beach, Gravesend, Bensonhurst and Dyker Heights in 2019, he called for theft-proof mailboxes from the Postal Service, which is the direct fix. An entry system helps by keeping the space where mail is delivered locked between deliveries, by letting residents see who is at the door before releasing it, and, with a video station, by recording who rang. It does not secure a mailbox panel that sits outside a locked door, and it is no substitute for collecting mail promptly.
Stores, offices and door hardware
Our shop is on 86th Street under the train. Will people upstairs be able to hear a visitor at a door station with the el running overhead?
They can, with the right station and placement. A train passing overhead is loud enough to drown out a conversation on the sidewalk for several seconds, so a station with a weak speaker and an open microphone will be hard to use. We choose stations with good noise handling, mount them in the recess of the doorway where the building blocks some of the street noise rather than on the open face of the wall, and set the volume at the door on site while a train passes. A video station helps too, because a resident who can see the visitor can wait for the train to clear before talking.
For the shop's own door, the noise matters less, since staff can see customers through the glass and release from the counter. What matters there is keeping the shop's release separate from the apartments' door.
Our office on Bath Avenue wants to buzz patients in from the front desk. Can the button be at the desk and the door still lock behind every patient?
Yes. The receptionist gets a release button, and usually a small monitor showing the camera at the door. The door gets an electric strike or lock, and the closer is set so the door pulls shut and latches after each person. With a strike, the door is released for a few seconds when the button is pressed and then locks again on its own. If the office wants the door open during busy hours and controlled at other times, the release can be switched from the desk.
Because an office door is usually part of the way out of the building, the lock must always let people leave freely. With a strike and a lever handle that is automatic; with a magnetic lock it takes a sensor, a push-to-exit device and a fire-alarm release, which the commercial section above describes.
The owner of our building wants a magnetic lock on the street door instead of a strike because it is cheaper. What else has to come with it?
Quite a lot. Allegion notes that "Electromagnetic locks are only available fail safe," which means the door unlocks whenever the power fails. The International Building Code's rule for these doors also calls for a sensor on the inside that unlocks the door for anyone leaving, a manual "PUSH TO EXIT" device near the door that cuts the lock's power directly, unlocking when the fire alarm or sprinklers activate where the building has them, and listed hardware. By the time those parts are added, the magnet is rarely the cheaper choice for a Bath Beach street door.
There is also the question of the outage. A street door held by a magnet is unlocked during every power cut. A fail-secure electric strike keeps the door locked, while residents with keys still get in and everyone inside can still get out with the handle. For most residential street doors here, a strike is the better fit.
HPD checks self-closing doors without a complaint. Could installing a buzzer cause our doors to fail an inspection?
It could if the work is careless, which is why we treat the closer as part of the job. HPD's guide for owners says it "does not wait for complaints to inspect for self-closing doors," and a door that does not close and latch on its own is a Class C violation with 14 days to correct. Installing a strike changes where and how the latch engages. If the strike sits a fraction too far from the latch, or the closer is too weak to push the door past the strike's lip, the door will rest just off the latch and fail.
Our installation ends with the door released from every household and from the street station, then let go, and watched until it closes and latches by itself every time. If the closer is worn, we adjust or replace it as part of the quote. That way, a door that passed before the buzzer still passes after it.
