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.
An example in the case of geographical distance might be to examine the time of travel between pairs of towns in winter and summer.
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.
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.
The premise is as old as time: a mixed-up pair of twins swapped at birth, town mouse and country mouse.
But the fate of two pairs of besieged towns has been bound together, their inhabitants at the mercy of the forces that are fighting each other.
Many of the anti-Assad fighters holed up in the town belong to a group called Ahrar al-Sham that has laid siege to a pair of pro-regime towns in northern Syria: Fua and Kefraya.
