Questions Midwood owners, boards, tenants and shopkeepers bring to us, together with ones raised in Brownstoner forum threads, Habitat magazine, Brick Underground, halachic guidance on building entrances and the city's own rules, answered for the houses and buildings here.
Co-ops and apartment buildings on the avenues
Our 1920s Ocean Avenue co-op still has the lobby wall niche where an old intercom phone once hung. Can the new panel be built into that niche?
Often it can, and it is usually the best spot in the lobby. A niche that once held a house phone already has a cable path behind it, it is out of the way of the door swing, and it was designed into the lobby, so a panel set there looks as if it belongs. We measure the niche's depth and width before choosing the panel, because a flush-mount panel needs more depth than a surface-mount one, and the back of an old niche is often plaster on masonry rather than an open cavity.
Two checks decide it. First, the niche has to be where a visitor arriving at the door will see it and be able to reach the buttons, which for public use means between 15 and 48 inches off the floor under the 2010 ADA Standards. A niche placed for a doorman's convenience inside the inner lobby may be the wrong side of the door for an unattended panel. Second, the panel's camera, if it has one, has to see a visitor's face from where they will stand. Where the niche fails either test, we use it for the panel's power and wiring and mount the panel itself beside the door.
Our co-op board was told that any app-based intercom needs a new data cable pulled all the way to the front door. Is that always true?
No, though it is true often enough that boards hear it as a rule. Habitat magazine's 2017 article on new buzzers noted that many smartphone-compatible systems "rely on internet cables and often need new wiring at the building entrance." Some panels do need a network cable at the door. Others connect over cellular service and need only power and the door release. Still others are hybrid systems that run on the building's existing two-wire riser and add phone answering through a gateway in the cellar, so the door needs no new data cable at all.
For a Midwood prewar co-op, the hybrid route is often the most economical, because it keeps the old riser working for the apartment stations and adds phone answering for residents who want it. A cellular panel suits a door where running any cable is hard, but the signal has to be tested at the mounting point before anyone relies on it; a recessed lobby entrance between masonry walls can be a weak spot. We price the options side by side so the board can see what each one actually requires.
The transformer for our building's old intercom is plugged into an outlet inside the super's apartment. Should the new power supply go there too?
No. A buzzer's power supply should sit on a circuit the building controls, in a common space such as the cellar or a utility room, not in anyone's apartment. A supply plugged into an outlet in an apartment goes dead whenever that apartment's breaker trips, its power is shut off for work, or the occupant unplugs it to use the outlet, and the whole building loses its entry system without anyone knowing why. It also means the super's apartment has to be entered whenever the system is serviced.
We move the supply to a common location on its own labeled circuit, with battery backup so the system rides through a short outage. If there is no suitable outlet in the cellar, a licensed electrician adds one before we install; that is named on the written price beforehand. We do not do 120-volt electrical work ourselves.
The apartment handsets in our six-story building are a mixture of brands from different decades, because broken ones were swapped one at a time. Does that mean the system cannot be extended?
Usually it means the system should not be extended any further. A mixture of handset brands on one riser is a sign that each repair was done with whatever part was available, and that the system is now held together by compatibility nobody can guarantee. Adding more of the same, or a new lobby panel on top of it, tends to produce intermittent faults: some apartments ring, some do not, some can talk but cannot release.
The better path in most Midwood co-ops is to keep what is good about the building's system, which is normally the riser cable, and replace both ends together: a new lobby panel and matching apartment stations designed to work on that cable. The board then has one system, one manufacturer's parts and one set of instructions for residents. Where the budget does not allow every apartment at once, we can plan a system whose new stations work alongside the old ones for a short period, but we say plainly how long that arrangement is likely to hold.
Our building's old intercom has a separate wire for every apartment rather than a shared pair. Does that make reusing the cable easier or harder?
It depends on what you install next, and it is worth knowing before the quote. Older audio systems were often wired with a multi-conductor cable or a bundle in which each apartment had its own wires back to the lobby panel. That cable is plentiful and usually in better shape than people expect, because it carries very little current. Modern two-wire systems need just one good pair per apartment, so a building wired this way often has spare conductors to choose from when one tests poorly.
Where it gets harder is in the lobby and the cellar, where all those individual wires meet. Every one has to be identified, tested and relabeled, and in a building with dozens of apartments that is a careful morning's work. We do it before the price is final, because the result tells us how many runs can be reused and how many have to be replaced, and that is most of the difference between a modest job and an expensive one.
Houses on the side streets
The right-hand doorpost of our front door already holds a mezuzah, exactly where an installer wants to put the door station. Where does the station go instead?
The mezuzah stays where it is, and the station goes elsewhere. In most Midwood houses that means the opposite side of the door casing, the wall beside the door on the latch side if the mezuzah is on the hinge side, or a position lower on the same post where it does not crowd or cover the mezuzah. We ask about the mezuzah at the first visit, look at where visitors approach from, and choose a slim station that fits the space left. If the household's rabbi has a view on spacing, we follow it.
The same care applies inside. Apartment stations are often mounted beside an apartment's entrance door, which also carries a mezuzah, and in houses with several interior doorways we check each one. None of this adds cost; it simply means the layout is drawn with the mezuzah in it from the start rather than discovered when the drill is already in hand.
Our house in the Fiske Terrace–Midwood Park district has a wood porch with turned columns and no masonry anywhere near the front door. What can a door station be fastened to?
The plain wood trim around the door is usually the answer. The Landmarks Commission's guidebook asks that intercom panels go "within or adjacent to a door opening" and that installations be compatible with the building's architecture, discreet and as small as possible. On a porch house, the flat face of the door casing or a plain board beside it meets those terms. Turned columns, brackets, balusters and decorative moldings are the parts of a porch that give the house its character, and they are the parts we never drill.
We measure the casing first, because some Midwood porch casings are narrow, and choose the slimmest station that fits. Its cable runs inside the casing or behind the trim, down through the porch floor and into the cellar, so nothing shows. The permit application includes the manufacturer's cut sheet and photos of the doorway, and the station goes up only after the permit is issued.
Shabbat and holidays
Will the camera on a new video door station record an observant resident walking past it on Shabbat, and can it be set up so it does not?
It depends on the station and how it is configured, and most can be set up to avoid it. A typical video door station turns on its camera only when its call button is pressed, so a resident who walks past and uses a key does not wake it. Some stations, though, have motion detection that wakes the screen or starts recording when anyone approaches, and some buildings add a separate entrance camera that records all the time. Those are the devices that raise the question.
For a household or building that wants to avoid them, we disable motion wake on the station, put any entrance camera where a resident using the key is not walking straight into its view, and set the porch or vestibule light on a timer set before Shabbat rather than a motion sensor. Peninei Halakha's discussion of building entrances treats standing where a security camera will record oneself as a question in its own right, and communities rule differently on it, so we set up the devices the way the household or board asks rather than deciding for them.
Some buildings leave the street door unlocked for Shabbat so observant residents can get in. Is that safer or riskier than other arrangements?
Riskier, and it is not necessary. A door left unlocked for a day lets in anyone at all, and the other residents of the building may not even know it is open. In 2016 CBS New York reported on a Crown Heights building whose front door "was left unlocked for the Sabbath," where surveillance video showed a man following a woman into the lobby. That is the scenario a working entry system is supposed to prevent.
The safer arrangement is a street door that stays locked every day of the week and opens for observant residents with an ordinary mechanical key. An electric strike leaves the door's own lock and key working, so the buzzer and the key coexist on the same door. Habitat's 2024 reporting suggests that boards are expected to make that kind of key access available, so in Midwood we plan it from the start rather than waiting for a request.
Shops and mixed buildings
Couriers keep arriving on Saturday while our Avenue J store is closed for Shabbat. What should our delivery buzzer do then?
Nothing that opens the door. The delivery station can ring unanswered, or a phone-answering station can be set so that it does not forward calls during the hours the store is closed. The door stays locked on its strike, with no timed or remote release, and a small sign at the station giving the store's hours saves couriers a wasted ring. Most regular carriers learn the hours within a few weeks.
The arrangement to avoid is any that depends on someone remembering to lock the back door on Friday afternoon. With a closer that pulls the door shut and a fail-secure strike that keeps it latched without power, the door locks itself every time it closes, so the store is secure over Shabbat whether or not the last person out thought about it.
Our Coney Island Avenue building has a store on the ground floor and four apartments above, all sharing one cellar. When the store's lease turns over, does anything on the apartment buzzer need to change?
It should not, if the two systems were installed separately, and that is the reason we install them that way. When a store changes hands, the new tenant's contractors often clear out the old tenant's equipment in the cellar, and if the apartments' buzzer transformer is plugged into the store's outlet, or its cable shares a junction box with the store's wiring, it goes into the dumpster with everything else. The apartments find out the next time someone rings.
The protection is simple: the residential system's power supply on the landlord's own circuit, its cable in its own path, and clear labels in the cellar reading which equipment belongs to the apartments. If your building's buzzer currently runs off the store's power, the turnover is a good moment to separate it.
Rules and inspections
HPD now picks 300 buildings a year for proactive self-closing door inspections. If ours is chosen soon after a new buzzer goes in, what about the entrance will the inspector actually look at?
Mainly the door, not the buzzer. HPD's guidance describes inspectors checking that apartment doors and hallway doors, including the building entrance, "swing closed and latch by themselves." For the street door, that means the closer, the hinges and the latch, and whether the door completes its swing and catches every time without anyone pushing it. A new strike that holds the latch properly helps; a strike installed on a door whose closer is weak or whose frame is out of line does not fix anything.
So when we install a buzzer in a Midwood apartment building, the closer is adjusted or replaced as part of the job, the strike is aligned with the latch, and we test the door closing from fully open several times before we leave. If the door was already failing to latch before the installation, we say so on the written price and include the closer work, because a self-closing violation has to be corrected within 14 days of the notice.
