I sometimes do work in one of the most exclusive co-ops in Manhattan, and unbelievably they actually let me put my bike in the basement bike rack. (virtually unheard of in my experience) So the other day they had cleared out the whole basement for some maintenance and asked me to put my bike in the long-term bike room. I never knew it was there, but behind the door in that dark little cavern there were several dozen bikes in a rack, almost all of them covered in a thick layer of dust. The dust was so thick you couldn't even tell what color a bike was until you wiped it off. Some pretty nice old steel in that rack, untouched for years. Then I remembered the CL ad from a few weeks ago listed by a building super trying to empty out a storage bin: "2 bikes, one Favorit, one Raleigh- $40 for both, but you must take both". Missed out on that one. Made me wonder how many secret bike caves must exist in Manhattan alone.
If I had a larcenous bone in my body I would have cleaned up one of those Italian beauties and left my Raleigh Sports sitting there in the rack.

Joe NYC

The bike room in the co-op where I live mostly has fairly crappy bikes, and too modern for my taste. Since I'm an architect who occasionally deals with (among other things) leakage issues, I see a fair number of basements, and early this year I was in a storage room that had a a really nice lugged bike with full Campagnolo group thrown way up on top of a bunch of other stuff, decades worth of dust on it, in a security cage. I asked the super who owned it, and gave him my card, to pass on to the owner -- but never heard back. There are probably a lot of those in Manhattan -- too bad there's no "use it or lose it" provision in US property law.

You should see my basement.

+1 Mine too! You can barely walk because of the bikes these days! My long-suffering wife realizes, of course, that I could be doing much worse things than tinkering with bikes, so she doesn't try to impede the hobby.

There is in Massachusetts where if an item is left in a "public place" for two years it can be considered abandoned property. So if someone left a car, bike, boat, whatever on a public street, park, parking lot, etc. for two whole years untouched you could lay claim to it.