Reach someone who has actually opened a riser
Phone and email below, both answered during business hours. Send the five things listed on this page in your first message and you will usually get a real technical answer back rather than a request for more information.
Phone, email and hours
- Phone: (917) 353-9599. This is the fastest route, and the right one if a building is locked out or a door will not release.
- Email: info@gothamaccesscontrolny.com. This is better for anything with a photograph, a drawing, a specification or a certificate of insurance requirement attached.
- Hours: Sunday to Thursday, 9am to 5pm. Friday, 9am to 12pm. Closed Saturday.
- Service area: all five boroughs of New York City, Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, and Westchester County.
There is no showroom and no walk-in address, because there is nothing useful for you at one. This is a service-area business. The work happens in your basement, your riser closet and your lobby, and that is where the survey happens too. Written correspondence, certificates and contracts go to a business address that we will give you directly when there is a reason to.
If you reach voicemail it is because the phone is in a riser closet in a basement with no signal, which is where it usually is. Leave the building address and what the system is doing, and you will get a call back the same business day.
We are not a 24-hour emergency service, and we will not pretend to be
We work regular business hours. There is no overnight callout, no round-the-clock line, and no guaranteed response window, because a small operation that promises one is going to break it.
What we do in practice is triage. A building where nobody can get in (a dead entrance panel, a failed door release, an access system that has locked out an entire staff) goes to the front of the queue, and in most cases that means same day or the next business day, during business hours.
If your situation genuinely cannot wait until morning, say so when you call and we will tell you honestly whether we can help or point you at somebody who runs a night desk. That is more useful to you than a promise nobody answers.
Five things to put in your first message
Any one of these can save a phone call. All five together usually mean the first answer you get is technical rather than administrative.
- What the building is. Type and size: a six-unit walk-up, a 90-unit post-war elevator building, a storefront, a 40,000 square foot warehouse. Roughly when it was built matters more than you would think: a pre-war building and a 1985 building are entirely different problems behind the wall.
- What it is doing, not what you think is wrong. “The buzzer sounds but the door does not open” is far more useful than “we need a new intercom.” Symptoms narrow the fault down; a diagnosis sends us looking in the wrong place. Tell us whether it affects every apartment or just some, and when it started.
- A photograph of the equipment and its label. The lobby panel, the amplifier cabinet in the basement, the label inside the door of that cabinet, the reader at the door, or the recorder in the closet. A single clear photograph of a model number often answers a question that would otherwise take a site visit.
- Where the building is. Borough or town, plus the nearest cross streets. It affects scheduling, parking and loading, and in some places it affects the work itself: a landmarked facade changes what can be mounted at the entrance before anyone discusses hardware.
- Who decides, and what the approval path is. Owner, managing agent, board, or a general contractor running the job. If a co-op or condo board has to vote, tell us when it meets. A scope that lands three days after a board meeting waits a month for no technical reason at all.
What happens next
You get a written reply, usually the same business day
Not an automated acknowledgement. A person reads what you sent, and if the answer is straightforward you get it in the reply, including when the honest answer is that this is not our trade, or that it is repairable and you do not need what you thought you needed.
We agree a survey window
A standard site survey costs nothing anywhere in the service area. We need access to the riser closet, the basement equipment room and the doors in question, and half an hour of the superintendent’s time is worth more than a day of guessing. Where your building requires a certificate of insurance before a technician enters, tell us the exact entity names at this point rather than later.
The survey itself, 45 to 90 minutes
We ring out the riser, meter the power, inspect the door hardware, measure cable routes and photograph everything. You get a verbal read before we leave, including the parts you may not want to hear, such as a riser that will not carry what you were hoping to buy.
A written scope, 2 to 5 business days later
Model numbers, cable types and listings, a door-by-door schedule, what is being reused, what is excluded, named unknowns with capped allowances, and a fixed price. Read it, compare it, and take as long as you need. Nothing is invoiced up to this point.
Where we work
Everything inside this area gets a free standard site survey. Outside it we will tell you plainly rather than take a job we cannot service properly afterwards.
New York City
5 boroughs areas- Manhattan
- Brooklyn
- Queens
- The Bronx
- Staten Island
Neighborhoods within those boroughs
9 shown areas- Upper East Side
- Harlem
- Williamsburg
- Park Slope
- Bay Ridge
- Astoria
- Flushing
- Forest Hills
- Riverdale
Long Island
Nassau & Suffolk areas- Hempstead
- Garden City
- Great Neck
- Long Beach
- Rockville Centre
- Huntington
- Babylon
- Islip
- Smithtown
Westchester County
6 cities, 23 villages areas- Yonkers
- White Plains
- New Rochelle
- Mount Vernon
- Scarsdale
- Rye
- Harrison
- Port Chester
- Larchmont
- Mamaroneck
- Tarrytown
- Bronxville
What we can answer on the phone, and what we cannot
Some questions have real answers before anyone visits, and some do not. Being clear about which is which saves everybody a wasted appointment.
Answerable on the phone: whether a symptom sounds repairable or terminal; roughly what a category of work costs in this market; whether a piece of equipment is still supported; whether a job needs a fire alarm contractor, an electrician or a locksmith rather than us; what a managing agent is likely to require before letting a vendor in; and whether a locking arrangement you have been quoted is likely to be permitted on that door at all.
Not answerable on the phone: the price. Not because we are being coy but because the number genuinely is not knowable. In a multi-tenant building the single largest cost driver is how many conductors in the existing riser still work, and that is a measurement, not an estimate. A firm price given over the phone for a building nobody has walked is a guess, and guesses become change orders halfway through a job.
What we will not do is sell you something on a first call. If the honest answer is that a failed power supply or a corroded terminal block explains the symptom and a new system is unnecessary, that is what you will be told.
Common questions
What is the fastest way to get help with a building nobody can enter?
Call rather than email, and say in the first sentence that residents or staff cannot get in. That phrase changes how the job is queued.
Have three things ready: the building address, whether it affects every apartment or only some, and whether the entrance door itself is now unsecured. That last one matters. A lobby door that has failed unlocked is a different urgency from one that has failed locked, and it changes what we bring.
If it is out of hours, leave the message anyway. It gets picked up at the start of the next business day and a lockout goes to the front of the queue rather than into the general list.
Can I just text a photograph of the panel?
Yes, and it is often the single most useful thing you can send. A clear shot of the model number on a lobby panel, an amplifier label inside the basement cabinet, a reader at a door or the front of a recorder frequently answers in thirty seconds what a phone description cannot answer at all.
Useful additions: a photograph of the terminal block with the existing wiring visible, a shot of the riser cable where it enters the cabinet, and a picture of the entrance door and frame from about six feet back so the closer, the hinges and the strike pocket are all visible.
What we do not need is anything showing camera positions, floor plans or a security weakness in a building that is not yours. We will not ask for it and we will not publish anything you do send.
We are a managing agent with several buildings. How should we start?
Start with the worst one rather than the whole portfolio. A single building produces a survey report and a written scope you can hold against whatever you are getting from your current vendors, and it costs nothing.
Send us your standard vendor requirements at the same time: certificate of insurance wording, exact entity names for additional insured, house rules and permitted work hours, and how work orders are raised. Getting those on day one instead of day twenty is the biggest single schedule saver in managed property.
If it goes well, portfolio work is where consistency starts paying: the same hardware across sites, one credential scheme, documentation filed the same way every time, and a super in Yonkers able to describe a fault using the same labels as a super in Astoria.
Do you charge for a call-out to diagnose something?
A standard site survey for planned work (new system, replacement, upgrade) costs nothing inside the service area.
A service call to diagnose and repair an existing fault is chargeable labor, and we will tell you the rate before we come rather than after. Where the visit turns into a quoted project, we will say how the diagnostic time is treated in that quote up front.
The genuinely expensive diagnostic work (opening finished walls, dismantling a riser, or a full point-to-point continuity test across a large legacy system) is quoted separately before any of it starts. It is real labor and pretending otherwise just moves the cost somewhere less visible.
Do you work outside the five boroughs, Long Island and Westchester?
As a rule, no. The service area is drawn around what can be reached and serviced properly, and a system installed four hours away by somebody who will not realistically come back for a warranty call is not a favor to anyone.
Two exceptions are worth asking about: a portfolio where most of the sites are inside the area and one sits just beyond it, and subcontract work for a general contractor or architect where the rest of the package is inside the area.
If you are outside it, say so in the first message and you will get a straight answer rather than a survey booking that quietly falls apart later.
Work that usually comes with this
Intercom Repair
Diagnosis and repair of dead handsets, silent panels, buzzers that ring but won't release.
Access Control Installation
Complete door-control systems, from a single door to a multi-building portfolio.
Property Management
Portfolio work: one vendor, consistent hardware, COIs on file, documented every time.
Small Business & Retail
Storefronts, bodegas, salons and offices: cameras, buzz-in entry and back-of-house control.
Describe the symptom, not the solution.
Tell us what the building is doing and send a photograph of the panel. You will get a technical answer back, and if it is repairable rather than replaceable you will be told that too.
Sun to Thu 9am to 5pm · Fri 9am to 12pm · Sat closed