Twenty minutes north, about five miles up Broad Street or 5th Street, and we are open until six so you can come straight from work. Center City cars are garage and permit cars, which means expressway chips found late rather than street break-ins. A fill is $60 to $130 and thirty minutes; a windshield is $250 to $450 fitted; side and rear glass is $200 to $500. LT Auto Glass, 3538 N Lawrence Street. Call 215-608-1108.
4.6★ on Google — 101+ reviews
A downtown car is used differently from a car anywhere else in this list. It is not how you get to work, it is how you get out of the city: the weekend, the shore, the drive to see family in the suburbs. It lives in a garage deck or on a permit block, it does most of its miles on the expressways rather than on city streets, and it can go a fortnight without being looked at closely. The predictable consequence is late discovery. A stone off I-676 in September puts a neat star in the glass that nobody notices in a dim garage, and the first anyone knows about it is a January morning when there is a line running across the screen.
The second thing worth saying plainly is that mobile work often does not suit Center City, and we would rather tell you that on the phone than turn up and fail. Garage decks come with height bars a service van will not fit under, columns parked so close you cannot swing a door, and building managers with no interest in a contractor bonding glass on their deck. Metered street work downtown is not realistic either. So the practical answer from Center City is the drive: straight up Broad Street or 5th Street, twenty minutes outside the peaks, a firm price agreed before we start, and a shop that stays open until six.
The downtown grid is one-way and metered end to end, with garage entrances set mid-block and ramps cut for a narrower generation of car than most people drive now. Market Street and Broad Street quarter the district, the numbered streets alternate direction, and almost every route out of town funnels toward the Vine Street Expressway trench along the northern edge. East of 5th Street the older squares still sit on granite curbing and block paving in long stretches, and a car crossing those is shaken at a frequency that finds any weakness already in a piece of glass. North of Vine the character changes fast on the run up toward us: the meters stop, the lanes widen, the surface deteriorates and the truck count climbs.
“I would definitely recommend this place for any glass repairs. Someone broke into my car through the sunroof, and they were able to fix it the same day without needing to keep my vehicle. The price was communicated to us in advance, which I appreciated. Just a heads-up: they only accept cash, not cards, so make sure to withdraw money before you arrive.”
One, expressway miles. Almost every mark on a downtown car was picked up on I-676, I-95 or the Schuylkill, off patched concrete, in the right-hand lane, behind something heavy. Two, storage. A car living on a dim deck can hide a star in the glass for an entire season, and that season is full of hard frosts at night and hot defrosters in the morning. Three, the garages themselves. Corkscrew ramps and columns set too close account for a steady run of broken mirror glass and small quarter panes, which owners assume is body shop work and usually is not. Four, construction. Something is always being built downtown, and the fine grit that comes off a hoarding or a dump truck lands on parked cars and gets dragged across the screen the first time the wipers move.
The simple version is Broad Street northbound: pick it up at City Hall and stay on it past Girard, Lehigh and Allegheny, then turn east onto Erie Avenue and run across toward Front. Drop south off Erie into the small streets a couple of blocks before Front; N Lawrence is the block between Front and 2nd and we are number 3538. If Broad is closed for an event, 5th Street north out of Old City works just as well and drops you onto Erie at the same place. About twenty minutes outside the peaks. Leaving the car and taking the Broad Street Line back downtown from Erie station is a realistic plan if you would rather not wait.
Lt Auto Glass & Auto Repair works across Hunting Park and the surrounding towns — pick your neighborhood:
Often not, and it is better to know that before you take a morning off. The obstacles are physical rather than fussy. Height bars stop the van at the entrance, bay widths and columns leave nowhere to stand alongside the glass with a door open, deck temperature and ventilation work against the adhesive, and a good many buildings will not authorize the work at all. Ask your garage what they permit. If the answer is no, the drive north is twenty minutes and the work gets done properly indoors with the right lighting.
Yes, within reason. We close at six Monday through Saturday, so a chip fill at half past five is realistic because it is thirty minutes of work, while a full windshield started at that hour is not, because that is an hour on the car and then a drive-away window on top before it should be moved. If you want a windshield done in one visit, come in the morning or plan on leaving the car. Call 215-608-1108 and we will tell you what fits into the day.
Erie station, about a mile and a half west of us on the Broad Street Line, runs straight back down to City Hall, Walnut-Locust and Lombard-South, which is a quick way into town. The buses along Erie Avenue connect to it. Most people who drop a car in the morning are back downtown well inside half an hour. Tell us on the phone that you are leaving it and we will call you the moment it is finished rather than waiting for you to check in.
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