About five minutes. Point Breeze sits directly north-east of the shop, a mile and a half at most, and the job people from these blocks call about is nearly always a smashed door window: $200 to $500 fitted, usually same day, with every shard vacuumed out of the seat rails and the door card before you get the keys. A chip fill is $60 to $130 and takes half an hour. We are at 2640 Snyder Avenue, 215-608-1108.
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Every car in Point Breeze sleeps on the street. The blocks are narrow enough that a delivery van stopping for two minutes backs up everything behind it, and from about six in the evening the parked cars are nose to tail on both sides from Wharton down to Tasker and out west toward 25th. That is a long stretch of hours for a car to sit unattended on a quiet block, and it is why the single most common call we take from Point Breeze is a rear door window that went overnight.
The other half of the picture is a neighbourhood being rebuilt one house at a time. There is a skip or a scaffold on most blocks, contractor pickups come and go with sand, stone and rubble, and the grit that ends up on the road gets thrown by the next car through. Chips from around here are usually collected within a mile of home rather than on a highway. Both problems are cheap to deal with early: $60 to $130 and half an hour for a chip, against $250 to $450 once it has run. And if the car is not safe to move, glass all over the seat or a window that will not stay up, say so on the phone and we will come to you instead.
Point Breeze Avenue runs across the grid on the diagonal, which is what makes driving here awkward. It meets the numbered one-ways at an angle and creates the odd five-cornered junctions everybody slows right down for. Wharton, Reed, Dickinson and Tasker carry most of the east-west movement and 20th through 25th take the rest, with Grays Ferry Avenue clipping the western edge. Almost every side street is one-way with parking on both sides and about enough room left for one moving car, so drivers squeeze past double-parked vehicles with inches to spare on the mirror. Off-street parking is close to nonexistent north of Mifflin, which is why the kerb here does the job a garage does anywhere else.
“They were able to install a new drivers side rear window for me the same day I called, when all the other shops were saying it could take a few days. They did a wonderful job and even cleaned up all the glass that was in my car (even folded a blanket I had in there that got glass on it) from my window being busted in.”
One: overnight break-ins, and it is not close. Rear door glass on the pavement side is the usual target, and tempered glass does not crack, it collapses into thousands of pieces that get everywhere. Two: construction grit. Infill building sites on nearly every block put sand, stone and broken brick on the road surface, and a car following a loaded pickup takes it in the windshield. Three: the squeeze. Passing a double-parked car on a street this width is how mirrors get clipped and how quarter glass meets a wing mirror coming the other way. Four: time. A car parked outside all winter with a chip in it will crack eventually, because the glass is cold, the defroster is hot, and the block paving does the rest.
It is a short run and the direction is always the same: get down to Snyder Avenue and turn west. From the Wharton and Reed blocks, come south on any of the numbered streets, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, until you meet Snyder, then head west past 25th. We are between 26th and 27th on the north side. From the Point Breeze Avenue end, follow the diagonal south-west and pick Snyder up on the way across. Five minutes on a normal morning, ten if something is unloading on 23rd. If the car will not move safely with the window out, call 215-608-1108 and ask about the van instead.
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Usually yes, but tell us the block when you book. We need room to open a door fully and stand beside it, roughly the width of a parked car and a bit more, plus dry weather for the adhesive. On the tighter one-ways the practical answer is to work from the parking space rather than the traffic lane, so a spot on the wider side of the street helps. If your block is impossible on a weekday morning we will tell you on the phone rather than turn up and find out.
Do the arithmetic first. Door glass is $200 to $500 fitted and comprehensive deductibles are often $500 or more, so a claim can cost you the same as paying and still leave a claim on record. Chip repairs are the opposite: comprehensive usually pays those in full and many drivers pay nothing at all. We bill insurers directly when it makes sense and we will say plainly when it does not.
Most side windows are under an hour once the glass is in front of us, and there is no cure time to wait out. Door glass is mechanical, held in a regulator, not bonded in like a windshield. The part that takes the time is the cleanup, getting the pieces out of the door skin, the window channel and the seat rails so you are not still finding glass in June. Call 215-608-1108 with the year, make and model and we will tell you whether the pane is on the shelf.
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| Saturday | 08:30 – 16:00 |