Midtown: the main street, the Starlite Pines blocks behind it, and new corners going up between the two

Every other city in the valley has a downtown with a hardware store on the corner and somebody behind the counter who cuts keys. This one does not, and never did, because the street and the houses around it went up together after the fields were subdivided. So the errand that would be a ten-minute walk elsewhere is a phone call here, and the van is the counter. Thirteen minutes is the run to these blocks and it is the shortest number on this map. That is not a marketing figure, it is where the base happens to be, and the pages for the hillside and the business park carry honest longer numbers instead.

The commercial half of Midtown is aluminum and glass, and it gives way slowly rather than all at once. A hookbolt that stopped reaching its keeper when the frame shifted. A deadlatch worn shallow enough that the leaf no longer holds itself. A closer with nothing left in it, so the door drifts back open behind the last person out and the shop stands open to the street without anybody intending it. The complaint tends to arrive months after the cause, which is why the first thing that happens on an aluminum door is that the door itself is put back into square. Storefront hardware is $159–$486 per opening and a business lockout is $142–$265, both with the $89 call-out already inside the figure. These calls come at closing rather than at opening, so the $48 that rides on an arrival between eight and midnight comes up often and is counted into the total while you are still on the phone.

Above and behind the shops the job changes twice over. Some of the rooms over the row are small offices reached by a door off the sidewalk and a flight of stairs, and that door gets used by every suite up there rather than by one tenant, so before anybody is dispatched we ask who is authorizing work on it. That is a matter between the tenant and whoever runs the building, and one short message generally does it. Where three or four suites share the stair, the landing and a back door onto the service lane, the sensible arrangement is one key sitting above each tenant's own rather than a ring nobody can read. That is a master key plan, priced after the doors have been walked and counted, because the number comes out of a chart and a chart cannot be written down a phone line.

The residential blocks behind the row are the plainest work on this page and the most frequent. A front entry, a gate down one flank, a service door into the garage, and a ring where two of the keys are duplicates of duplicates and one of them stopped working at some point nobody can place. Reading the cylinder and cutting fresh keys to the depths it was built for is part of the $30–$47 per cylinder rather than an extra line on the receipt. A house lockout is $129–$246. Curb parking fills up along here for the shops, so car work lands on the same street: $106–$199 to open a car and $156–$429 for a key cut and coded beside it. Name the block and which side of the street you are on, and stay with the car instead of walking up to meet the van.