It’s as if we cannot imagine a building without also imagining someone who wants to break into it, endlessly speculating on the city’s impending misuse. Every new technology comes with an accompanying threat—or perhaps promise—of new crimes. Consider the case of the airplane bandits. In an article published on September 11, 1910, the New-York Daily Tribune predicted that silent airplanes would be the next big thing in burglary tools. According to the article, “those who have watched the growth of aviation most closely are speculating upon the probable appearance of the aeroplane burglar, or ‘sky pirate,’ as he might be called.” This is presented matter-of-factly, as if anyone would see an airplane and immediately speculate as to its potential for robbing the city.
The author of the piece rapidly gets carried away, describing a lengthy fictional scenario in which a New York City mansion has been robbed from above by the pilots of a silent aircraft. “The easiest access to a locked house is to be had from overhead,” the author writes, “as any city dweller can see for himself if he will go up and look at the door in his own roof.” Accordingly, the article suggests that a private corps of “wealthy amateurs” should be formed, volunteering en masse to serve as a new neighborhood watch on the rooftops of Manhattan’s fanciest towers and hotels.
The accompanying illustration looks like something out of Batman, with a shadowy airplane swooping down over a Gothic roofscape; the pilot’s accomplice leaps up from a skylight to grab a rope ladder dangling precariously from the plane’s fuselage. The article’s subtitle is “When Sky Thief Comes.”
As long as we have had houses, we have had burglars on the brain.
Today, even robots are getting in on the act. If we’re not scared of silent airplanes, perhaps we’ll learn to fear children’s toys. A security research team led by Tamara Denning and Tadayoshi Kohno at the University of Washington suggests as much. They have explored the criminal potential of wireless electronic toys being turned into semiautonomous accomplices to burglary.
In a situation as notable for its comedic potential as for its criminal ingenuity, Denning and Kohno suggest that belligerent hackers might take control of your “household robots” before ever stepping inside. Writing back in 2009, they chose toys known as the Rovio, Robosapien, and Spykee, pointing out how these specific products could be used together to obtain private information about your house—things such as room layout, the location of motion sensors, whether you locked the back door before going to bed at night, if anyone is at home in the first place, and, more important, where certain things—jewels, cash, pharmaceuticals, car keys, even a handgun—might be kept.
Interestingly, Denning and Kohno point out that certain combinations of robots could make different types of crime possible. You might own, say, a Rovio and a Robosapien, but only on that fateful day when you come home with a Spykee is their disastrous cabal realized: working together in criminal synchrony, coordinated in ways their manufacturers had never anticipated, this specific combination of robot toys can now act.
From rocks to robots, the tools of burglary surround us: they are adversaries in waiting.
Nineteenth-century superburglar George Leonidas Leslie is buried in Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills Cemetery under the name George Howard, one of his many criminal pseudonyms. “George Leonidas Leslie, alias Western George, George Howard, J. G. Allison, George K. Leslie, C. G. Greene, etc., ad infinitum,” retired New York City police chief George Washington Walling lists with clear exasperation in his memoir, referring to a man for whom identity was as fluid and easy to pick as a combination lock.
A “large crowd of curious spectators” was on hand to witness Leslie’s funeral, The New York Times reported back in June 1878, yet Leslie’s grave today is unmarked by any headstone. On a cloudy spring afternoon threatening rain, my wife and I drove out to visit the grave with a friend of ours, fellow true-crime enthusiast Jimmy Stamp. Stamp studied architecture at Yale and has worked for firms on both coasts. He and I had talked so many times about true-crime burglary stories, not to mention our mutual love of heist films, that I thought he might get a kick out of seeing where one of the most notorious architectural criminals of American history had been interred.
The grave was not easy to find. We were given a photocopied map at the cemetery’s administrative office, as well as a series of ever more specific coordinates—section, division, block, grave number—yet even then I had to use my cell phone to call the superintendent a few times and confirm that we were in the right location. It felt like triangulating ourselves through a supernatural variation on GPS, a macabre manhunt, reading the names off nearby headstones and radioing in for confirmation that Leslie’s grave was nearby. It probably took us half an hour to find the grave, and we were probably there for another forty-five minutes, talking about Leslie’s life and trading several stories from the strange-but-true world of modern burglary.
Then, perhaps because the afternoon was so relentlessly gray, the temperature so unseasonably chilly, our subject shifted closer to home: What were we doing there? Why had three busy New Yorkers, with plenty of other commitments on their plates, not to mention the plethora of more conventional attractions offered by the city, taken almost an entire afternoon to visit the grave of a dead criminal who made his living stealing things from others?
For Stamp, burglary represented far more than a quest for money, revenge, or newfound wealth. From the instant an architect shapes a space, Stamp argued, people feel compelled to second-guess it, to look for something the architect might have missed or to be the first person to notice a key detail everyone else has overlooked. Heists obsess people because of what they reveal about architecture’s peculiar power: the design of new ways of moving through the world. Every heist is thus just a counterdesign—a response to the original architect—and something of a transformative moment in a burglar’s relationship to the built environment. It is the moment at which the burglar has gone from a passive consumer of architecture to an active participant in the world’s design.
That we constantly line up to see new films about burglary—or that we buy so many crime novels featuring ingenious ways to break into bank vaults and buildings—suggests that something is fundamentally lacking in our own relationship to the city, and that there is something universally compelling about the abstract idea of breaking and entering. Indeed, even as I finish writing this book, a long slew of new heist blockbusters is set to hit the big screen, implying a nearly inexhaustible public interest in seeing people subvert security systems or sneak into locked buildings in unexpected ways. This is precisely where “burglary” becomes a myth, a symbol, a metaphor: it stands in for all the things people really want to do with the built environment, what they really want to do to sidestep the obstacles of their lives.
Burglary reveals that every building, all along, has actually been a puzzle, Stamp said, a kind of intellectual game that surrounds us at all times and that any one of us can play—in fact, that each of us does play, even if that means just sneaking into a girlfriend’s bedroom for a late-night kiss or tiptoeing down the hall to use the bathroom without waking up the rest of the family. In both cases, that means using a building as a burglar would: operating through stealth and silence while sticking to the shadows and blind spots.