But on one block in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where ambulances screech past, buses tread their noisy route and an occasional bird is lucky to get a chirp in, residents of a pair of town houses have reached a sort of noise détente.
On an unseasonably warm day in October, eight interior design students in their 20's were given a tour of a pair of town houses being built in Brooklyn with a hybrid solar-thermal/gas-fired climate control system, cork and stone flooring, recycled glass countertops and sorghum stalk kitchen cabinets.
This year, Nuckolls County, population 4,843, lost another two schools, to budget cuts and declining enrollment, perhaps dooming another pair of towns to Hardy's fate in a region that has seen nearly two-thirds of its population disappear since 1920.
An example in the case of geographical distance might be to examine the time of travel between pairs of towns in winter and summer.
Founded 75 years ago by the businessman and collector George Hewitt Myers, it occupies a pair of brick town houses that retain signs of their domestic origins.
They found the solution in a pair of nearby town houses that had been combined to create a generous single-family home.
They too robbed banks and identified themselves with the Hollywood version of Bonnie and Clyde – itself a suitably ironic point since it glamourised a pair of small town, unsuccessful hoods who didn't look much like Warren Beatty or Faye Dunaway.
From there, it intersects the southern end of M-119 and passes through a pair of small towns, Conway and Oden, that border inland lakes like Round Lake and various bays of Crooked Lake.
Because of the unavoidable press of bodies at peak hours, women travel in separate carriages – but every so often, couples who cannot bear to be parted or a clueless out-of-town pair will blunder into the "general compartment".
Professor Lareau said that among the well-off families she followed for her new book, "Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life University of California Presss, 2003), were a pair on an out-of-town trip to a soccer championship who left two 10-year-olds, two 8-year-olds and a 5-year-old alone in a hotel room while the two sets of parents went out to dinner a mile away.
So for those who have invested in it, has real estate become the dirtiest pair of words in town?
