Locksmith Work for University City Flats, Rentals and Loop Storefronts

Locks R Us Locksmith covers University City, from the shops and restaurants along the Delmar Loop to the brick houses and two-family flats on the streets either side of it, and out along the Olive Boulevard corridor. We work for homeowners, tenants, landlords and businesses on lockouts, rekeying, lock repair, replacement and new hardware. If you are stood outside a locked door as you read this, start with our lockout service.

We are a mobile service, so we come to the property. Call (636) 628-7803 with the address, tell us whether it is a house, a flat, a unit or a shop, and we will tell you what we can do and when. Open every day from 8 AM to 10 PM.

A City That Changes Hands Every Summer

University City sits right against the eastern edge of Washington University, and a large share of its housing is rented rather than owned. That gives the place a rhythm you do not see in most of the county: a great deal of it changes hands in the same few weeks every year. Leases end, keys come back, and nobody is quite sure how many were cut along the way.

If you are a landlord here, that is the moment worth planning for rather than reacting to. Rekeying a unit between tenants takes minutes when it is booked alongside the others, and rather longer when it is booked one at a time in the last week of August. Tell us the addresses and the unit count together and we will work through them properly.

Flats, Shared Entries and Who Gets Which Key

Much of the older housing here is two-family and multi-family: a common street door, then individual doors behind it. That is two different security problems in one building. The common door has to open for every resident and for nobody else, and the unit doors have to stay genuinely separate from each other and from the landlord’s own access.

Done badly, it ends up as a ring of six keys per tenant and a landlord who can no longer open anything. Done properly, it is a keying scheme: one key for the common entry, one for the unit, and a master that reaches what the owner actually needs to reach. It is worth twenty minutes of planning before any cylinder is touched, and it is the single most useful thing we do in this part of the county.

What We Do in University City

Lockouts

House, flat, unit or shop. Call with the address, say what sort of lock is on the door, whether it is the common entry or your own, and whether anyone is inside. We open the door carefully rather than drilling out hardware that was working an hour earlier. More on getting the door open.

Rekeying Between Tenancies

Where the hardware is sound, changing the key that works it retires every old key without replacing a single lock. On a building of flats it also lets the whole scheme be tidied at once, so the common door, the units and the owner’s access all make sense together instead of having grown by accident over twenty years.

Old Doors and Tired Hardware

A lot of these houses went up in the first decades of the last century and still carry a fair amount of their original ironmongery. Some of it is better made than what would replace it and is worth keeping; some of it has been painted over so many times that nothing short of stripping will free it. We check the door and the frame before condemning the lock, because a bolt that will not throw is very often the door having dropped. More on repair and adjustment.

Lock Changes

Where hardware is worn out, damaged or simply not up to the job, we fit replacements, measuring the door, backset and bore first so the new lock genuinely suits the door it is going into. Old doors are rarely standard sizes, which is exactly why this gets measured rather than guessed. More on changing house locks.

Loop and Olive Boulevard Businesses

The independent shops, restaurants and studios along Delmar and Olive mostly run on glass storefront doors, which take a different lock body and a different closer from anything on a house. We handle cylinders, closers and exit hardware, and we can work around opening hours rather than shutting you down mid-service. More on locks and doors for business.

Keypad Locks for Rented Property

A code suits a rental far better than a key does. Nothing gets handed back, nothing gets copied at the hardware shop, and the code changes the day a tenancy ends. They do not fit every door, so we check thickness, backset and bore before anything is ordered. More on fitting keypad locks.

University City Areas We Cover

• The Delmar Loop and the streets running off it
• The Olive Boulevard business corridor
• The residential streets around Heman Park
• Parkview and the older historic streets
• The blocks bordering the Washington University campus
• North University City and the Midland Boulevard area

University City addresses fall mainly inside ZIP codes 63130 and 63132, with 63112 on the eastern edge. If it is a flat or a multi-unit building, give us the unit number and say whether the trouble is the common door or your own.

Local Landmarks We Work Near

• The Delmar Loop – the commercial spine of the city, named for the old streetcar turning loop, and home to the Tivoli Theatre, Blueberry Hill and the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
• The Lion Gates and City Hall – the stone lions at Delmar and the octagonal building behind them, built for Edward Gardner Lewis’s publishing business before the city took it over.
• Washington University – immediately east, and the reason so much of the housing here is rented on an academic calendar.
• Heman Park – the large park on the western side, with the community centre and the ball fields.
• Olive Boulevard – the long business corridor running west, thick with independent shops and restaurants.

Founded as a Planned City

University City was incorporated in 1906, laid out by a publisher who wanted a model town next to a new university and built it largely from scratch. That planning shows in the housing stock: streets of solidly built brick from the 1900s to the 1920s, many of them flats from the start rather than houses divided up later.

For our purposes it means two things. The doors are usually worth saving, because they were built properly and heavy timber outlasts the hardware bolted to it. And the buildings were designed around shared entries from the beginning, so a keying scheme that respects that will always work better than treating each door as its own separate problem.

Getting Out To You

Our base is in Ballwin and University City is a straight run east, so a job here often shares a day with one nearby. Clayton is just south, Ladue sits to the west, Creve Coeur is further out along Olive, and the eastern edge takes us straight into St. Louis itself. Every town we cover is listed on our service areas page.

There is no University City shop to call at – we are mobile and we come to the property. Our technicians are licensed and insured, with more than ten years of local work behind them, and we take major cards. Vehicle work is door unlocking only: no key cutting, no fob or remote programming, no ignition work. Open daily, 8 AM to 10 PM.

University City Locksmith Questions