motobecane69

UPDATE: Liberty Mutual has come through for me and I should have a check in my hands from my renters insurance by the end of the week. Plan is to buy a new road bike and then sell my current roadie to finance the new commuter bike.

I was pleasantly surprised at how helpful my agent was, I thoroughly expected them to try to screw me and they were simple and easy and this was despite hurricane irene and what I'm sure was an influx of claims coming in to them. My renters policy is about $130 for the year, I highly recommend it.

vol

That's wonderful. Do you get back the full price of your stolen bike?

motobecane69

i have a $500 deductible but the bike was built up piecemeal so it cost a pretty penny to put together just how I wanted it. I just had to show them all the receipts for everything. this time around i'm not going to build totally from scratch, i'm buying the steel nashbar touring bike and then going to do some slight mods to it just because it will get me back on the road faster.

vol

Happy for you. Now you have learned a lesson. Never leave your newly built bike unlocked.

motobecane69

realized i haven't updated this thread. Got a hold of the ins company last friday and was told that things were being processed and a check would be issues. Got my check in the mail yesterday! Time to go bike shopping!

raymeedc

I can sympathize with your apartment dilemma. I don't live that far from you..... right over the river in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint area of Brooklyn..... Bike Central. I, too, live a few flights up in a very narrow hallwayed RailRod (floor-thru) apartment. I presently have 4 bikes, one of which I'm determined (very reluctantly) to leave locked up in front of my building, in order to avoid the necessity of dragging a bike up & down the stairs whenever I want/need to take a jaunt. Mine also has Pinhead Skewers on the wheels & seat post, along with a Kryptonite chain/lock & a Kryptonite U-lock. The first night left outside resulted in the loss of my tire valve cap lights..... anything not nailed down, even so cheap ($5 for the pair) an item! I'm definitely not happy about the situation, but I'm trying to just dismiss it in my mind as already stolen, surprised & relieved each morning when it turns out not to be so (so far). Pretty pathetic, but that's life in The Big Apple.
P.S. - I'm also worried that the extra security I've placed on my bike might work against me, as I've heard of (& seen) bikes whose tires were slashed, wheels kicked in, etc. by frustrated thieves trying to "teach the owner a lesson" for securing his bike in so thorough a manner as to prevent it's theft.

motobecane69

yep, I worry about that too, but so far I've had good luck I like to think that I live in a pretty nice neighborhood (83rd and East end) where any ridiculous behavior like that would be noticed by someone. I have my bike locked along a wrought iron gate that blocks the stairs to my basement. I park it with the disc brake against the gate so as to not make it visible but this made my RD visible and that got stolen once. Fortunately, they'ev never vandalized it in anger. it's also parked directly below the first floor and basement apartments windows though there is a known drug user/dealer in my basement and I'm confident the vandals are people that know them that come in the middle of the night to buy whatever they are selling out of there. landlord can't get the guy out, he's been there since the early 80's. I'm looking into my options for a wireless camera to aim there as well.

motobecane69

bike wasn't unlocked, it was in a locked boiler room. it wasn't locked inside the boiler room because I thought my super may need to move it to get at something. someone either broke into the boiler room or the super said he may have accidentally left it unlocked. oh well. new commuter is on the way and I'm also getting a new road bike out of the settlement.

vol

Scumbags want to show what they are capable of.

christ0ph

I think that you were naive to leave your bike outside of your apartment, locked or unlocked.. in that situation. Who knows what happened. I would not trust that super. He probably does this all the time. Talk to others in your building. Also, you should consider this a warning that things get stolen in your building. One of your neighbors is a thief.

Do you have a chain door lock on your door? If you don't, you should. If I had nice things, i would also buy a high quality Medeco or Mul-t-Lock or similar quality lock with mushroom pins..(only) for my door. Not a Schlage or a Kwickset. A good Medeco deadbolt costs over $100. Consider it an investment in your safety.

I don't live in the city right now but I spent most of my life living in them. In some buildings, things can get very strange. I could tell a lot of stories that would not make sense unless you lived in that environment.

Just secure your stuff. Get an alarm that makes a lot of noise. If you have a good job and are gone during the daytime at regular times, you are a target.

In my experience, building managers are often untrustworthy. Not always, but a lot. They get free rent, but they often don't have jobs. they dont get paid, free rent is their pay. So, they do other stuff which may or may not be legit to eat.

A lot of the time they steal, letting themselves into apartments with their master key. There is something called a chain door lock that you can combine with a basic burglar alarm (use double stick tape to attach the sensors) Have it call your cell phone first and then you call the cops.. That will alert you when they try to come in, and stop them from gaining access unless they want to get caught. When you leave, its easy to make everything look the way it did when you moved in. If they say "we need a key to your lock" give them the wrong key, and if they say "thats the wrong key" give them another one.. If you do that and also secure your windows well.. (use long screws to fix most of your windows so they can open for air but not enough to let a person in Strong screws. And get an alarm that will sound, a strobe light, etc.. They will probably trip it once, then give up and rip someone else off instead of you..

If they give you a hard time, ask them how they knew. They wont do that. In a REAL emergency, the chain door lock would be easy to break, without any real damage. But it stops the casual building-manager-related thievery.

vol

Amen.

I actually was going to point this out, but OP said there were shady people living there, so I withdrew my intention.

When I moved to a new place, the lease said we are allowed to change lock or add new locks, as long as we provide a key to the super. But when I talked to the super about planning to replace the lock and giving him a key, the super insisted that I do not change the lock, even if at my own expense. Wonder why.

christ0ph

In the 70s I housesat for a short time in a building in lower mahattan that had been abandoned by its owners because of unpaid taxes and the people who lived there had taken over paying the bills and basically owned it.. It was also the home to a couple who every day rode their folding bikes up to Central park and collected horse dung from the streets around there for compost. They wore exclusively purple, their apartment was decorated entirely in purple tie die, and even their bikes were purple and they wore purple tinted sunglasses.. Their names were Adam and Eve. They published very strange - cryptic - purple - pamphlets.

Behind the building they grew food in a huge growing garden in the shape of a giant Yin Yang symbol. They gave a lot of the food they grew away to the neighborhood people. They ranged all over New York City on their bikes. Everybody called them the "Purple People".

The garden was my view down from my window. The apartment I was staying in was very scuffed up but it had gorgeous hardwood floors, beautiful tilework, and a spectacular view of the East River the other tenement buildings nearby, many of which were abandoned, and "The Garden of Eden" below.

Junkies lived in the building next door, though.. We had electricity, but the building across the air shaft from our apartment did not. I basically had few posessions at the time. Nothing worth stealing. One day when I returned home from whatever I had been doing I found an extension cord plugged in in the outlet in my apartment stretching across to the building next door. I just left it there and everything was left alone and I never had anything stolen. I lived there for a few months while my friend whose apartment it actually was was visiting his girlfriend in Sweden. It was a great location.

vol

Read you last post but can't figure out what you are trying to say here, christ0ph. Thought you would end with finding your apartment burglarized.

christ0ph

If you get ripped off, what they might say is that maybe an old tenant of that apartment had a copy made and kept it. If they wont let you use your own lock, insist that they swap locks from another apartment.

Otherwise, anybody who has lived in that apartment before you can theoretically just waltz in and nobody will be the wiser.

Also, often they have "master keyed" locks that are keyed so that one key will open all the locks. Then they do have a concern, indeed, its a pain to replace the custom lock if you change it and dont put the original back when you move.

Big buildings often have semi-professional managers who are not as commonly criminals. In order to prevent their having to carry around a large key box they are basically set up as their own locksmith and they have little kits of lock parts and they can create their own master keyed cylinders using whatever code they want, and also cut their own keys on the spot. But even they may go into a new tenants apartment when they are out just out of curiosity. If a lock keeps them out they will do crazy stuff like climbing up a long extension ladder in an air shaft or going up or down a fire escape. They just can be very nosy.

Mechanical keys and locks are really a 19h century technology that has been obsoleted and increasingly, is very insecure. Clearly, the lock and key paradigm is no longer secure. We've all seen the trick in spy movies where someone gets a copy of a key by photographing someone's keys.. Companies now will even cut a key from a photo..

Recently, a research group in San Diego showed what many had long assumed, that someone sitting a hundred feet away using a telephoo lens can photograph you using your key and then re-create your key in 15 minutes - cut one, and have it work the first time.

https://vision.ucsd.edu/~blaxton/sneakey.html

a Dutch group of security experts "Toool" have a web site where they discuss lock security and they have contests in which they see how long it takes to defeat locks. Often very expensive locks are defeatable. Even the aforementioned Medecos.. (although its nontrivial, Ive read)

Just assume that the usual neighborhood crooks would not be that smart, or they most certainly would not be crooks. They would probably work for some government.

robberry

It's annoying as hell keeping my bike in the hall, but at least it's safer than it would be. Honestly, I should probably lock it to something inside too.

robberry

P.S. Glad this worked out for you!

robberry

ALWAYS change the lock!!! The super is probably just lazy. Tell him the lease says I can, and that's exactly what I'm going to do.

christ0ph

Wait until next year! I bet they'll raise your premium.

christ0ph

Lock it to somehing solid through the frame and the front wheel if possible. Otherwise, I give it two weeks, if you are on a lower floor.

robberry

Definitely not on he ground floor.