For some years we lived in a rowhouse development about a mile outside the Washington, DC, beltway. It would be difficult to overstate the general shoddiness of

For some years we lived in a rowhouse development about a mile outside the Washington, DC, beltway. It would be difficult to overstate the general shoddiness of the construction, which was from the early 1980s. But with the firewalls, we rarely heard the neighbors--we could just hear one household's TV from a corner of the basement. Now, there were a handful of times, averaging perhaps every other year, when somebody would have a loud late party.