A locksmith whose rate before you commit.

Eden Locksmith works Hayward and the unincorporated strip beside it, out of a van rather than a storefront, because a lock is bolted to a door and does not come to a counter. Hayward, San Lorenzo and Castro Valley were Eden Township long before the lines on the map moved, and the name is still here on a district, a greenway and a hospital, which is where ours comes from. The van sits near Jackson Street and carries what these doors take: builder deadbolts and knob sets for the 1950s tracts in Burbank, Glen Eden and Mt. Eden, mortise parts for the older houses on Prospect Hill and Upper B Street, electric strikes, deadlatches and entry panels for the apartment blocks and fourplexes on Tennyson Road and Mission Boulevard, hookbolts, cylinders and closers for the glass fronts downtown, exit devices for restaurant kitchens and for the warehouses out toward Eden Shores, keypad locks, safe tooling, and key blanks and programmers for most of what parks at Southland. Calls are answered 24/7, nights, weekends and holidays.

Half of this city rents, so the work is set up for tenants and for owners in equal measure. A tenant shut out of a unit on Tennyson proves the address with a lease page or a bill on a phone and gets let in, with no call to an owner and no sense that a renter is a smaller job. An owner or a property manager gets cylinders counted one by one, units keyed apart under a single management key, old keys returned in labeled bags, a receipt split out by door, and the job described in writing for a file or an insurer. The figure is said on the call and already holds the $89 service call. A house lockout runs $115 to $199, a car lockout $95 to $185, a rekey $24 to $39 a cylinder, replacement hardware $109 to $289 a door, a car key $139 to $379, a safe opening $175 to $479. An arrival between 8pm and midnight adds $45 and between midnight and 7am adds $80, both counted in before you say yes to anything. Master key systems and access control are quoted once the doors have been walked and counted. Whatever turns up behind the door, the receipt carries the figure from the call.

Everything runs outward from Jackson Street. Downtown and B Street see the van in about 16 minutes, Jackson Triangle and Burbank and the Cannery in 18, Prospect Hill and Upper B in 21, Mt. Eden and Tennyson and Southgate in 26, Eden Shores and the shoreline in 28, and Hayward Highlands and Fairway Park in 31, which is the longest run inside the city and the hill is the reason. Outside the line, Cherryland and Ashland come in around 21 minutes, San Leandro 22 north up Hesperian, San Lorenzo 24, Union City 28, Castro Valley 31. Twenty-four minutes is the citywide average. Where a district is slower it is named as slower on the call, because a window that turns out to be wrong is worse than a longer window that holds.