Cherry Hill
A postwar township of splits, ranches and attached garages, wired into Philadelphia by the PATCO Speedline. What that means for a lock, and how to check a New Jersey locksmith license before work starts.
Cherry Hill is a township that was built almost entirely after 1950, and its lock problems follow from that. Most houses have four or five exterior openings, a patio slider and a door from the attached garage into the house. The garage-entry door is usually the oldest untouched lock on the property, still carrying the hardware the builder hung and, in many cases, still on the bitting the first owner received at settlement.
What comes up here
The garage-entry door
On a house with an attached garage, the door from the garage into the kitchen or laundry is usually the one lock nobody has thought about since the builder handed over the keys. It is also the door most likely to be opened by whoever has the opener remote clipped to a visor.
The Woodcrest lot at 6:30 p.m.
The PATCO park-and-ride lots at Woodcrest and Ashland hold cars that do not move for eleven hours. A driver who locks the keys inside at 7:40 a.m. does not learn about it until stepping off the Speedline after dark, with no spare key within twenty miles.
The mall lot on a Tuesday afternoon
The Cherry Hill Mall lot produces a steady midday automotive volume with no relationship to nights or weekends. Engine off, keys on the seat, doors locked, and a person standing in a parking row with a full trunk.
The closing-day rekey in Barclay Farm
Closings peak from April into July, and the new-owner rekey is the one job here you have time to shop properly. It is worth asking how many exterior cylinders the price covers before agreeing, because a split with a garage entry and a side door has more of them than people expect.
The February slider
Freeze and thaw moves frames. Wide patio sliders and side entry doors that closed fine in December start binding or refusing to latch in late February. It reads as a broken lock, and it is usually a strike and alignment problem.
The door nobody thinks about
Cherry Hill was built after 1950, and the sections read like a construction timeline. Erlton came first, Old Orchard and Kingston Estates in the 1950s, Barclay Farm in the 1960s, Woodcrest and Wexford Leas filling in behind them. The house that resulted is a split, a ranch, a bi-level or a colonial, with its own lot, its own driveway and an attached garage.
That last feature creates the single most characteristic lock situation in the township. The door from the garage into the kitchen or the laundry room is usually the oldest untouched lock on the property. Front doors get replaced. Garage-entry doors do not. On a house that has changed hands twice since 1968, that door frequently still operates on the key handed over at the first settlement, and the opener remote that gets a person into the garage is clipped to a visor in a car parked outside.
None of that is a reason to panic. It is a reason to count that door when somebody quotes you a rekey.
Four miles and a century away
Camden is fifteen minutes up Route 70 and might as well be a different trade. There, a party wall on each side means one usable door and a hundred-year-old mortise lockset. Here there are no party walls, no vestibule doors and no shared stair door. The Camden three-key problem, street door and common door and unit door, does not exist in Barclay Farm.
What Cherry Hill has instead is quantity. Front, back, side, slider, garage entry. Five openings on an ordinary house, most of them on 30 to 60 year old builder-grade cylindrical hardware with worn cylinders and strike plates that have sagged with the frame.
The city means Philadelphia
The PATCO Speedline runs from Lindenwold through Woodcrest and Ashland into Center City, and those park-and-ride lots hold cars that do not move for eleven hours. It produces the definitive South Jersey commuter lockout: keys locked in the car at 7:40 a.m., discovered at 6:30 p.m. by someone who has just walked off a train in the dark and whose spare key is in a kitchen drawer they cannot reach.
Midday, the volume moves to the Cherry Hill Mall lot, which has generated automotive lockouts since it opened in 1961 as the first enclosed mall east of the Mississippi and gave the township the name it adopted that same year.
Winter, and the call people misdiagnose
Late February and March bring a wave of doors that worked fine in December. Freeze and thaw heaves frames, pulls strikes out of alignment and swells wood, and wide patio sliders show it first. The key turns, the bolt throws, the door will not stay shut. Most people describe that as a broken lock. Say what is actually happening instead, because a strike and alignment problem and a failed cylinder are different jobs at different prices.
Before anyone starts
Confirm the total price out loud, including the service call, labor, parts and any after-hours premium, before work begins. Ask for the State-issued photo identification license card and check it against the state record. Look at the vehicle: business name, license number and municipality, both sides, three-inch lettering. In a township of driveways there is no excuse for an unmarked car, and an unmarked car is a reportable violation.
LocksmithNJ has no office, storefront or vehicles in Cherry Hill. It holds no New Jersey locksmith license and performs no locksmith work.
Areas and landmarks
Neighborhoods
- Barclay Farm
- Erlton
- Kingston Estates
- Woodcrest
- Old Orchard
- Wexford Leas
- Downs Farm
- Springdale
- Colwick
- Ashland
Landmarks
- Cherry Hill Mall
- Barclay Farmstead Museum
- Croft Farm
- Woodcrest PATCO station
- Ashland PATCO station
- Cooper River Park
- Garden State Pavilions
- Springdale Farms
Nearby
south-jersey-camden
Common questions
Why does the door from my garage matter more than my front door?
Because of history, not hardware. On most Cherry Hill houses the front door has been changed, upgraded or rekeyed at some point, and the garage-entry door has not been touched since construction. When a licensed locksmith rekeys a house here, that door is the one most often forgotten, so count it out loud when the scope is being agreed.
I just closed on a house here. What does a rekey actually cover?
Ask that question specifically, before the work starts. Rekeying changes which key operates an existing cylinder, and pricing normally runs per cylinder after a service call fee. A split-level with a front door, a back door, a side door and a garage-entry door has four, and confirming the count in advance is how the number on the invoice ends up matching the number on the phone.
My key turns but the door will not latch. Is the lock broken?
Often not. Late February and March produce a wave of these calls across South Jersey after the freeze-thaw cycle heaves frames and pulls strikes out of alignment. The lock can be working perfectly while the bolt no longer meets the strike. Describe the symptom exactly that way when you call, because it changes what the job is.
How do I verify a Cherry Hill locksmith before letting them start?
Ask for the State-issued photo identification license card and check the name and number at newjersey.mylicense.com/verification/. Check the vehicle as well. N.J.A.C. 13:31A-1.13 requires the business name, license number and municipality on both sides in lettering at least three inches tall.