Party Wall

Let’s put on our dancing shoes, because it’s time to talk party walls.

Wait, party walls? Is that where all the party wallflowers hang out while everyone else is mingling and having a good time?

Well…no. A “party wall” is the wall between adjoining apartments, condos, or office space belonging to different tenants. It serves as the property line between two units, and they’re called party walls because each side of the wall is occupied by a different…wait for it…party.

So why did we have to put on our dancing shoes for this? Because one common element of party walls is sound-dampening material, which means we can dance the night away in our own apartment without our next-door neighbors hearing every cha we cha. Hypothetically, anyway (though we’re pretty sure some of the apartments we’ve lived in skipped this part).

Party walls are also usually required to be firewalls...not like the kind that protects us from computer viruses, but the kind that helps prevent actual physical fire—like with flames and stuff—from spreading from one unit to the next. And if that’s not something to dance about, we just don’t know what is.