Interesting book, although a bit dry at times. Starts great with history about Leslie and architecture, meanders a bit.
[George Leonidas] Leslie was so dedicated to detail, so confident in his abilities, that he would often case the interiors of banks both during business hours and long after: before his gang robbed the Manhattan Savings Institution in October 1878, Leslie had already broken into the bank twice, stealing nothing, simply checking out the building for himself and verifying that he had the correct combination for the vault door. This gives Leslie the air of an addict, seemingly unable to resist the lure of an uninhabited architectural space emptied of its workers, unable to turn down the illicit thrill of a bank interior that temporarily belonged to him alone, having realized long ago that the best way to commune with an architectural space was by breaking into it.
Here in Northampton, Leslie's gang turned their attention from space to time. [...] Anticipating the watchman's future narrative of the heist, which would naturally include details of when the perpetrators arrived, how long they spent in the vault, and, most important, what time they fled into the shadows of the New England night, they also tampered with the watchman's clocks, stopping or breaking them.
... his extensive, homeschooled expertise in the city's fire code, explaining how the city's own regulations can be read from the outside-in by astute burglars, turning Toronto's fire code into a kind of targeting system. Simply by looking at the regulated placement of fire escapes on the sides of residential high-rises, Dakwsin could deduce which floors ad fewer apartments (fewer would mean larger, more expensive apartments, more likely to be filled with luxury goods)
... the idea of designing out crime is by no means unique to our era. In nineteenth-century Paris, for example, acting under instructions from Emperor Napoléon III, urban administrator Georges-Eugène Haussmann instituted an extraordinarily ambitious series of urban improvements. He ordered the demolition of entire neighborhoods, the erasure of while streets from the center of Paris, and the widespread replacement of them both with the broad, leafy, and beautiful boulevards Paris is known for today. This was not motivated by aesthetics, however, but was explicitly a police project, a deliberate - and quite successful - effort to redesign the city so that the streets would be too wide to barricade, the back alleys no longer winding or confusing enough for insurgents and revolutionaries to disappear or get away. The urban landscape of Paris became a police tool, its urban core reorganized so aggressively that popular uprisings would henceforth be spatially impossible.
