BRETT KILBOURNE: GOOD NEIGHBOR

True Lives; Is Every Man Everyman? Is Everyone a Story? We Drove Nails Into the Phone Book, and Went to Find Out.

There are eight million stories in the naked city.

That was the sign-off line for the 1948 movie "Naked City" and the TV series it spawned. It was an arresting premise: Everyone has a story to tell. All lives are interesting.

It makes for good fiction. Is it true?

On Monday, five writers each took a nail and hammered it into a phone book. Where the nail stopped, the writer started. That person would be the story, so long as he or she agreed to be interviewed.

We used phone directories for the District, Northern Virginia, and Prince George's and Montgomery counties. We used nails from Strosnider's. We used a hammer from Hechinger. We used the stories as we found them: Ordinary. Unembellished. Riveting.

The grand design of Monsieur L'Enfant goes to bloody hell on the 1700 block of V Street NW.

You think you're on Florida Avenue and, sure, it slides into U Street somewhere along here but this isn't U Street, is it? There goes 17th and the sign up ahead says Champlain but Champlain doesn't go through. It dead-ends into a block of row houses that are in a row, all right, but a row with the same sense of uniform logic as the streets.

The houses are on a diagonal and most of the houses are brick, but one has siding and several are painted -- not just pastels, primary colors, too; that one down toward the end is bright blue -- and the bunch in the middle of the block are made of stone. Not limestone or flagstone or any of your suburban shales, but brownstone, big, chunky blocks the color of the Industrial Revolution. They are that same rusty shade you see over on 16th Street, where a wall is all that remains of a castle that once loomed opposite Meridian Hill Park.

"This was a carriage house," says Brett Kilbourne. He's standing in a low-ceilinged room in one of the stone row houses, a house his father bought decades ago as an investment and Brett has lived in since 1988. It is a funky little place with three squatty stories and what real estate agents call "bags of charm," not to mention a basement, the only one in the bunch, to store the coal.

So there is a whole history that goes with the real estate, of how a senator's wife built the mansions out on 16th Street, which she succeeded in having renamed Avenue of the Presidents (at least for a year). It is history that can truthfully be described as diverting, and one of the things it diverts attention from is what has come since.

The neighborhood, in short, has been a jumble not only in terms of architecture but in terms of residents. People can live side by side and never be real neighbors. When Brett moved in his fiancee (now his wife), Justyna, they were welcomed most lustily by a woman who made it clear that she saw them as reinforcements for her side of a long-held grudge against another resident, one whose home she suspected was a refuge for rats. They had children. She did not approve.