Walk into most Belleville garages built between 1954 and 2000 - and a lot of them, since the bulk of the housing stock here dates from the 1960s and 70s - and you'll feel it before you see it: a thin line of outside air along the bottom of the door, sometimes along the sides too. The rubber or vinyl seal that was installed when the house went up has spent decades getting baked, frozen, and run over by the same tires twice a day. It shrinks, it cracks, it stops sitting flat against the slab. On a door that old, the seal is rarely the same one that came with it, and even a decent replacement job from ten or fifteen years back is due. This isn't cosmetic. A gapped seal on a garage that shares a wall with living space, which is common in this stretch of houses, means that gap is feeding cold air straight into a room you're paying to heat. You can often see daylight under the door from inside, or slide a sheet of paper under it and pull it through with no resistance. That's your sign the seal has quit doing its job, not just aged a little.
Not every draught needs a same-week fix. If the gap is small, under a quarter inch, and it's on the top or a side rather than the full width of the bottom seal, you can usually wait for milder weather to deal with it rather than working in a cold garage. A door that's otherwise moving fine on its track, with springs and cables in good shape, isn't going to get worse fast just because the seal is tired. If your garage is detached or unheated anyway, a seal issue costs you comfort but not much on the heating bill, so there's no urgency to it. Where I'd push you to move sooner is a shared-wall garage in this area, since the same 1960s-70s construction that gives Belleville its housing character often means minimal insulation between garage and house. In that setup, a bad seal in a cold-moderate climate is money leaking out under the door all winter.
Belleville sits in a cold-moderate climate band, which means the seal on your door isn't dealing with one hard freeze and done - it's cycling through freeze and thaw repeatedly across a winter, and that cycling is what actually wears vinyl and rubber seals out faster than straight cold would. Each time the seal freezes stiff, gets compressed by the door closing, and then softens again, it loses a little more of its shape. On the older end of the local housing stock - homes from the 1950s and 60s - the door frame itself may have settled or shifted slightly over sixty-plus years, so even a brand-new seal won't sit flush against an uneven slab or a frame that's no longer perfectly square. That combination, aging seal material plus a frame that's moved, is the specific reason draughts show up worse in older Belleville houses than in the newer builds toward the edges of the service area. A seal that would seal fine on a flat 1995 slab won't seal the same on a 1958 one.
Close the door at night and look for light along the bottom and sides - a bright strip means the seal isn't making contact. Run your hand along the bottom edge from outside; you're feeling for stiff, cracked, or flattened rubber rather than something that still gives a little under pressure. Check the corners first, since that's where an out-of-square frame in an older house shows up worst. If the seal looks intact but air still comes through, the problem may be the frame or slab, not the seal itself, and that's a different repair. I'll say plainly: a new bottom seal is a cheap part and often a fair DIY job on a door that's otherwise healthy, but if the gap is uneven side to side, that's frame or track alignment, and no amount of new seal will fix a door that isn't hanging straight.
Belleville's cold-moderate climate puts the seal through repeated freeze-thaw cycling rather than one long steady cold spell. Each cycle stiffens and then softens the rubber, and that repeated flexing breaks down the material faster than constant cold alone would.
Likely part of it. A lot of the local housing stock from that era has had sixty-plus years for the slab or frame to shift slightly. Even a fresh seal won't sit flush against a frame that's no longer square, so the gap can persist after a seal replacement.
Layering strips on top of a failed seal usually just moves the gap somewhere else. If the existing seal is cracked or flattened, replace it outright. If the frame itself is uneven, extra strip material won't solve that part.
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