These are the questions that come from this neighbourhood's own doors: landmarked townhouses, pre-war co-ops with restricted keys, households that travel, walk-ups without staff, and practices and galleries on the ground floor. Borough-wide topics — renters' rights, co-op key rules, building entry platforms, office towers — are on our Manhattan smart lock installation page and the five-borough guide it links to. Cost, coverage and booking questions are in the FAQ near the bottom. Nothing here is legal advice.
Townhouses in the historic districts
Can the ornate brass knob and escutcheon on our townhouse door stay exactly as they are once the lock goes smart?
Yes, and on most landmarked houses that is the plan we would propose first. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's rules treat repairing or replacing ordinary door hardware — hinges, knobs, handles — as work that needs no approval, but they expressly exclude “ornate historic exterior hardware on special doors”. If your outside hardware is the decorative original, the safest course is to leave every piece of it in place and do all the smart work on the inside face of the door, where nobody on the sidewalk can see it.
In practice that means one of three things. If the door already has a separate single-cylinder deadbolt, an interior retrofit can turn its thumb-turn and leave the key cylinder outside untouched. If the only lock is an old mortise lockset, a mortise-format smart lock or kit can sometimes replace the inside works while keeping the outside trim. If neither suits, the smart lock can go on the vestibule door or the door under the stoop instead, and the street door stays a beautifully kept mechanical lock. We photograph the exterior before and after so the record shows nothing changed.
We employ a housekeeper, a nanny and a driver — should each of them have the townhouse's main door, or only the service entrance?
That is a household decision, but the lock can enforce whatever you decide, and most families end up separating the doors. A common arrangement is that staff who arrive daily use the entrance under the stoop or the garden door with a personal code or phone key, limited to their working days and hours, while the parlour-floor street door is kept for the family and guests. The driver, who mostly needs to drop bags and children, may only need a code during school runs.
Giving each person their own credential, rather than a shared “staff code”, is what makes the system useful. The entry log then says who opened which door and when, you can change one person's hours without touching anyone else's, and when someone leaves your employment their access ends with one tap instead of a locksmith visit. We set it up with you, name every credential by person, and leave a single sheet showing who can open what — worth keeping with the household's other employment papers.
Pre-war co-ops on Fifth, Madison and Park
We had to show a key card to get copies of our high-security key — does going smart weaken that duplication control?
Only if the smart lock throws the old cylinder away. Restricted-key systems such as the Mul-T-Lock and similar cylinders that residents on r/uppereastside ask about are valuable precisely because copies can only be cut against a registered card. A keypad deadbolt that replaces your cylinder with the manufacturer's own standard keyway quietly swaps that controlled key for one that any key shop can copy. Many boards also want the building's key system to stay on every unit door.
The way round it is to keep the cylinder. An interior retrofit mounts over the inside of your existing single-cylinder deadbolt and turns it, so the restricted key, its card and the outside of the door all stay exactly as they were. Some smart deadbolts can also take a compatible high-security cylinder in place of the standard one; whether yours can is a question for the lock maker and the cylinder supplier, and we confirm it before you buy. Either way, the backup key for the door remains the controlled one, and the codes and phone keys are added on top of it rather than instead of it.
Is a lock that clamps onto the inside of our deadbolt as strong as the deadbolt itself?
It is exactly as strong as the deadbolt, no more and no less. Consumer Reports puts it plainly in its lock-buying guide: a retrofit smart lock's resistance to kicking, picking and drilling “is entirely dependent on the deadbolt it's paired with”. The retrofit is a motor and a radio sitting on your thumb-turn; the bolt, the cylinder, the strike and the frame are what stop a door being forced.
On a good pre-war co-op door with a high-security cylinder and a full-length bolt, that is excellent news — you keep a strong lock and add convenience. On a tired door it means the smart part will not fix what is already weak. So we check that the bolt extends fully into the frame, that the strike is fixed into solid material with long screws, and that the door is not sagging so far that the bolt only just catches. If any of those are wrong, they get corrected first, because a motorised bolt grinding against a misaligned strike also flattens batteries in weeks instead of months.
Our pre-war apartment has a second door from the kitchen to the service hall — should it be smart as well?
Often it should, and it is frequently the more useful of the two. In many classic layouts the kitchen door opens onto a back stair or service elevator, and it is the door that deliveries, porters and household help used to use. If the front door becomes keyless and the kitchen door keeps an old key that has been copied for years, the weak point has simply moved to the back of the apartment.
Two rules govern what we fit there. First, the door must stay openable from inside in one easy motion without a key; the city's fire-safety guidance says apartment doors should open from inside without a key and bars double-cylinder locks, and a service door that leads to a stair is very likely to be someone's way out in an emergency. Second, it is the building's door frame and often a rated assembly, so the board or managing agent will want to know what is going on it. Within those rules, a keypad or retrofit on the service door with its own log and auto-lock is a sensible pairing with the front door, set to match the hours staff actually use it.
Decades of paint have built up on our pre-war door's edge — does that matter for a motorised bolt?
It matters more than most people expect. Layers of paint on the door edge, the strike and the frame stop narrow gaps closing, drag on the bolt as it travels and can pack the strike pocket so the bolt cannot extend all the way. A person turning a key feels that and pushes the door; a small motor simply strains, reports a jam or stops short, and drains its batteries doing it.
So on older co-op and townhouse doors the preparation is part of the job. We open the strike pocket to full depth, ease paint off the bolt path and the latch edge, check the hinges are tight and the door hangs evenly, and adjust the strike so the door latches without being leaned on. Where the building's painter is due, we ask that the hardware edges be masked next time. It is unglamorous work, and it is the reason a smart lock on a hundred-year-old door can run as smoothly as one on a new condo door.
Households that are often away
When we tell the front desk we're going away, should the cleaner's and walker's codes be paused too?
If nobody should be coming in while you are gone, yes. Most buildings have a routine for residents who are away — holding packages, watching for leaks — and the lock can follow the same routine. The case Manhattan prosecutors brought in 2019 against a man who walked past doormen on East 79th and East 68th Streets and stole from apartments while their residents were on vacation is a reminder that an empty apartment is what such a burglar looks for.
With a smart lock, “away” can be a setting rather than a hope. Before you leave, regular service codes are suspended for the dates you are gone, and only the people you choose — the person watering the plants on Thursdays, say — keep access, on their own schedule. Every opening sends you a notification wherever you are, and if a code is tried repeatedly the lock tells you that too. When you are back, the normal schedules resume without anyone needing to be re-enrolled. We set up the away pattern with you once, so it is a two-minute job each trip.
If I'm suddenly admitted to one of the York Avenue hospitals, how does a friend get in to feed the cat?
This is one of the most practical reasons people living alone on the Upper East Side choose a smart lock, and it works as long as two things are set up in advance. First, a second administrator: someone you trust, ideally nearby, who can issue a code or a phone key from their own phone if you cannot. Second, the lock has to be reachable remotely, through its own Wi-Fi, a bridge or a Thread border router that stays powered.
Then the sequence is simple. From a hospital bed, you or your second administrator create a code for your friend that works only for the days you are away; your friend lets themselves in; you see each visit in the app; the code expires on its own. There is no envelope of keys at the desk and no need for the building to open your door. If you would rather the desk did it, a sealed emergency code can also be lodged with the building under its rules. We write the plan on the handover sheet, including who the second administrator is.
Yorkville walk-ups and newer towers
As the owner of a small Yorkville walk-up, should the money go on the street door or on each apartment door?
For an owner, the street and vestibule doors come first. They are yours to control, they protect every tenant and the stair, and they are where trouble starts: in March 2023 police arrested a man inside the vestibule of a four-storey walk-up on East 82nd Street near East End Avenue who was trying to kick in the inner door. A street door that closes and latches by itself every time, with a good strike, a keypad or fob reader and a working intercom release, does more for the building than any single apartment lock.
Apartment doors are a different matter. City rules require the owner to provide a key lock on each unit entrance and let tenants add their own lock as well, and the Tenant Data Privacy Act stops owners from making a smart system the only way into a tenant's home. So smart unit locks are something to offer, not impose, and a physical key always comes with them. Our usual advice is to fix the building doors properly, then let tenants who want keyless entry add an interior lock on their own side.
People keep slipping into our walk-up behind residents — can the street door be made to close and lock faster?
Usually yes, and it is mostly mechanical. Tailgating depends on how long the door hangs open after a resident goes through. A closer that is set too slow, has lost its fluid or fights a sagging door lets the door drift for several seconds and often leaves it resting just short of latched. A correctly adjusted closer brings the door back firmly through its final few inches so the latch snaps home every time.
Then the lock helps. With an electric strike or electrified lock, the door relocks the moment it closes, and a door position contact can tell the owner if it has been propped or left ajar. Some keypads and readers can also log each entry, which makes a pattern of tailgating easier to see. What a lock cannot do is stop a resident holding the door for a stranger, so we suggest a short note to tenants once the new door is in. For package theft specifically, a vestibule that locks behind the courier — or a delivery code that only works on the outer door — is worth discussing at the walkthrough.
Burglars in the East 80s and 90s came in through fire-escape windows — does a smart front door do anything about that?
Not directly, and we would rather say so. In late 2019 the 19th Precinct described a burglar who reached fire escapes from the street or the roof between Lexington and First Avenues and tried windows until one was unlocked, during working hours. A smart lock on the apartment door would have been irrelevant to how he got in, although an entry log and an “unlocked” alert can at least show whether the door was used on the way out.
The fire-escape window needs its own answer. City fire-safety guidance prohibits key-locked gates on fire-escape windows, because those windows are a way out, so any gate there has to open from inside without one. A window sensor on a simple alarm, or a camera inside the apartment pointing at the window, adds warning without blocking the exit. When we visit for the door, we are happy to look at the fire-escape window too and tell you which of those our alarm installation team in Manhattan can add.
Practices and galleries on the ground floor
Our practice occupies the ground floor of a Park Avenue co-op — whose rules govern a keypad on the practice's own street entrance?
Several sets at once, which is why we plan these doors with the practice and the building together. The co-op's house rules and its alteration process apply because the door is part of the building; if the building sits within the Park Avenue Historic District or another district, any visible change to the entrance is a Landmarks matter too; and once a powered lock is on a door that patients use to leave, the city's building code on egress applies. A practice's lease may also say who may alter the entrance.
The design that usually satisfies everyone keeps the facade as it is and moves the technology inside: a reader or keypad just inside the street door or in the vestibule, an electric strike in the frame that matches the frame's label, a release button at reception and free exit through the door in one motion. Staff each get their own credential, after-hours openings are logged, and the medication or records room can have its own lock on a separate schedule. We put the drawings and specifications together for the board's alteration review so the practice is not left to explain hardware it did not choose.
Our Madison Avenue gallery keeps borrowed works in a back room — can that door keep its own record of every opening?
Yes. The front door of a gallery and the room where works on loan or on consignment are kept do different jobs, and they should be on separate credentials. The front door opens for staff in the morning and closes behind the last visitor; the back-room door is opened by far fewer people, and every opening is worth knowing about. A keypad or card lock on that door, with its own user list and audit trail, gives the director a record of who went in and when.
We set the back-room door to relock automatically, alert the director if it is held open, and keep its credentials separate from the general staff code, so a part-time gallery assistant can open the shop without having access to the store. Where a lender or the gallery's insurer asks how access to stored works is controlled, the log and the user list answer the question. If the room has a solid or rated door, the lock is chosen to match it rather than the other way round.
