Making Money: The Locksmith

Is four dollars too high a price to get a key copied? Phil Mortillaro doesn’t think so. For thirty years, he has been making keys, installing locks, and cracking the occasional safe from his tiny storefront on Seventh Avenue South, in the West Village.

The place is hard to miss. The exterior shimmers with thousands of keys that Mortillaro has welded into concentric patterns and shapes. Inside, thousands more keys hang on the walls, rattling as the 1 train passes underground. There’s room for only one customer at a time, and that seems just right to Mortillaro.

After so many years in the Village, Mortillaro says he never does a job above Fourteenth Street, though he might send one of his employees; the calls he takes are the sort that are interesting only to a master locksmith, like picking a lock on a piece of antique furniture. But inside the shop, Mortillaro does everything: manufacturing parts, soldering tiny pieces of silver, filing handmade keys, and, most frequently, making copies.

The keys usually cost a customer around four dollars apiece, which is on the high end; Mortillaro says he charges that much mostly because he refuses to buy cheap, Chinese-made blanks, preferring the costlier brass or nickel blanks produced by American companies. He also throws in a key ring, which he says costs him forty-five cents. Add his labor and some generous rounding, and you get to four dollars. It might seem worth the price if you think about how long a key can last. As Mortillaro puts it, “What can you buy for four dollars that will last twenty years?”

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