I was recently elected as a town meeting member for my town (a pretty large town – 68,000 people), and tonight I attended my first-ever town meeting.  It was pretty interesting to see government in action, but I also found time to hunt down some old doors for you all.

You don’t see these old leather-wrapped doors much any more.  I can only remember them on one project that I worked on…a courthouse renovation in Boston.  Our town hall has quite a few pairs of these, but the ones on the lower level aren’t in great condition.  The pair in the photos is a side door to the balcony and the opening is in really good shape.  I especially like the oval glass lite with the curved wood glass beads.

The photo of the back of the closer illustrates how a corner bracket is used…this application isn’t very common these days, but I remember Harris Parsons Sr. (my current boss’ father) teaching me that when you order a handed closer that will be mounted on a corner bracket, you have to order the opposite hand closer.  I think I need to make up a Hardware Trivial Pursuit game so we don’t lose all of these historical tidbits.

I have never seen these doors locked but apparently someone wanted to lock them at one point during the building’s history, because they added the non-code-compliant hooks and eyes.  The space holds hundreds of people, so if these doors need to be lockable they require panic hardware.  I think removing the hooks would be a more realistic solution given the current budget situation.

I’ll be back at town meeting for as many nights as it takes us to get through 36 warrant articles, so if I don’t have the energy to publish a post, you’ll know why.

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