A Short History of Boston’s Triple Deckers
A Short History of Boston’s Triple Deckers
Between 1880 and 1930, an estimated 15,000 triple-deckers (also called three-deckers) were built in Boston and surrounding cities. Supplying the housing needs of huge numbers of new immigrants, and Black, working, and middle-class families, the triple-decker offered a path to homeownership, generated income for families who could both live and rent the same house and accommodated multigenerational family living.
The origin of the triple-decker is unknown. A common mythology suggests that a builder lacking the funds to finish a two-family Victoria home finished the structure by adding a flat roof instead of a Mansard roof. However, this is a moot point as the oldest known triple-deckers are largely mansard roofed with decks behind.
Other variations of the same story suggest a builder built a third story taller than first intended, and ultimately modified the structure, creating a usable third floor. The term itself ‘triple-decker,’ is believed to have been borrowed from a 1637 British man-of-war ship called the “Sovereign of the Seas,” which boasted three decks of guns above the waterline.
In 1914, sociologists Robert Woods and Albert Kennedy wrote:
The values which the tenant receives in this modern flat are so little short of luxurious that it is no wonder they are in demand. A flat which rents for from 20 to 25 dollars a month includes a parlor, dining room, kitchen with set tubs, cook stove with gas stove and water heater attached, two bedrooms, front and back piazza, hot air furnace, electricity and hardwood floors…
Apart from the economic value of the triple-decker, they also provided a small form of what Jane Jacobs would later call “eyes on the street.” Knowing that the house was full all the time was reassuring, “even if I don’t know them very well,” remarked one woman in a 1917 interview with the Worcester Planning Board.
Triple-deckers are simple structures; think of a free-standing building containing three narrow apartments stacked on top of each other. Internally, rooms like kitchens and bathrooms are usually kept directly above each other. This allows for an energy-efficient arrangement as it keeps electricity and plumbing in one direct line from top to bottom, and gives each apartment access to windows and natural light on all four sides. Arthur Krim of the Boston Redevelopment Authority wrote in 1977 that as an architecture, triple-deckers “are curious forms, part urban and part suburban. They look like apartments transformed into houses, or perhaps houses overgrown into apartments.” Their ambiguity feels a large part of their allure. Whether one treats them as a set of apartments or as their own row house, their communal quality allows this strange form to coalesce as a unit.
The New Haven Preservation Trust notes that beyond these general characteristics, they “display a broad range of variations… some have gable roofs, others have gambrel roofs; some have projecting window bays, others do not; some have 3-story porches… some are built of brick, others of concrete block; some are paired versions…sharing a common bearing wall.” In Boston, nearly all non-modern triple deckers are built of wood in a simple wood-frame style. Krim suggests that the usage of wood both originates from Colonial wood building technology and also connected Boston’s landmarks — such as the Paul Revere House — to the ongoing evolution of housing architecture.
As with all buildings, triple-deckers reflected the architectural taste of their time. Functionally between tenements and apartments, triple-deckers didn’t skimp on porches — their great innovation between the two typologies — and they developed both ahead of (and later along with) electric trolley lines that connected neighborhoods like Mattapan, Roxbury, and Dorchester.
Queen Anne Triple Decker in Worcester, MA by Brian Vanden Brink.
The earlier Queen Anne or Victorian style (1880s — mid19890s/1900) included decorative elements such as textures made with clapboards and shingles, and the occasional mansard, or sloped, roof. These triple-deckers tended to have full-height rear porches, and builders used patterned shingles and added iron crested towers. Small details like this helped individual builders distinguish and elaborate from house to house while the typology of the triple-decker was still evolving. During the Victorian period, gable and hip roofs developed, and eventually gave way to the Colonial Revival style. Colonial Revival Style had already been popular for other home types because they easily blended into the visual streetscape of Victorian Era Boston.
Taft Street, Dorchester. Photo by Matthew Dickey.
The Colonial Revival (mid-1890s/1900 — 1920s) is more austere than Queen Anne. The earlier triple-deckers of this style developed the two-story front porch which allowed families living on the second and third floors to have their own private balcony. The Colonial style used more uniform exterior sidings, which removed decorative textures, and plain columns and posts replaced the ornamented balusters and posts of the Queen Anne style, adding rounded bays. Elegant cornices, curved glass, and rounded bays became a feature of the more expensive triple-deckers, and the six-family house (two triple-deckers joined together, usually by a central staircase), came into fashion as well.
In the 1920s and later, triple-deckers began featuring a combination of elements from both styles, emphasizing functionality more than ornamentation.
Krim observes that Boston had two types of three-deckers due to different builders in each area. South Boston’s triple-deckers were mostly flat-roofed, Roxbury’s roofs were pitched, and Dorchester had a combination of both styles. Dorchester was a ‘street-car suburb’ of Boston, so housing developed adjacent to and with the expansion of the streetcar system. Krim writes that the streetcar and the triple-decker “had been perfected” in 1890, the year they collided in Dorchester.
As the triple-decker provided affordable housing for mostly immigrants and Black residents, this turned it into the central target for nationally-organized housing ‘reform advocates.’ These ‘advocates,’ all of whom held racist and xenophobic views rallied against the “triple-decker menace,” as described in a 1917 article published in Providence Magazine.
Small things such as code changes led to outright bans, and so, the eventual demise of new triple-decker construction. For example, the 1912 Town Tenement Act allowed Massachusetts municipalities to ban wood-frame structures where cooking was performed above the second floor. Most triple-deckers were wood-framed in the Boston area. And so, individuals like Prescott Farnsworth Hall — founder of the Immigration Restriction League and active housing reformer — became ‘fire hazards,’ even though Woods and Kennedy discredited this claim, observing that “with stairways and piazzas on two ends of the house, it would be practically impossible for people to be burned alive—and thus far losses of life in three-decker fires have been infinitesimal.”
By the 1920s, 36 municipalities in Massachusetts — including Arlington, Belmont, Brookline, and Swampscott — had banned triple-deckers, and by the 1930s, triple-decker construction had all but stopped. Some survived through World War II while others were bulldozed in the 1950s and 1960s as part of ‘urban renewal’ efforts; there are still a few empty plots in Boston bearing witness to where these houses were. However, many triple-deckers have survived and continue to be the primary housing stock for Bostonians.
Boston’s housing shortage is legendary at this point — and recently, triple-deckers have retaken the spotlight in conversations surrounding the creation of affordable housing in Boston. Historic housing stock tends to be more affordable to begin with, and triple-deckers are retrofittable with clean energy alternatives, as Bloomberg, The Boston Globe, WBUR (and others) have written. The City of Boston’s Mayor’s Housing Innovation Lab even launched the ‘Co-Creating Boston’s Future-Decker’ project in 2021. Other attempts to create more high-density housing include Governor Charlie Baker’s 2022 “MBTA Communities Bill” requiring 175 municipalities served by the T to build denser housing near a station, an action that anticipates thousands of apartments and condos.
All neighborhoods continue to bear the scars of Boston’s architectural past and so, of Boston’s social legacy. While it’s critical to continue building housing to accommodate a growing city population and make it affordable to live here, these modern structures lack a unique city character. Balancing development with aesthetics is important — and not simply for the sake of vanity, but for the sake of identity. Whether that identity needs to be reclaimed, recreated, or repurposed, it’s the triple-decker that gives us a window into the intersection of past and future: creating affordable, multi-density, and multigenerational housing while maintaining a distinctive sense of place.
Sources:
- Triple-deckers were once an affordable solution to Boston’s housing crunch — and can be again, Greg Minott, Boston Globe, 2021.
- Rediscovering the three-decker house, Howard Husock, Public interest, 1990.
- What happened to the three-decker?, Jacob Wegman, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2006.
- Sovereign of the Seas(1637); Warship; 100 guns, Royal Museums Greenwich.
- Rediscovering the three-decker house, Howard Husock.
- Three-deckers of Dorchester: an architectural historical survey, Arthur Krim, Boston Redevelopment Authority, 1977.
- TRIPLE DECKERS, New Haven Preservation Trust, 1985.
- Three-deckers of Dorchester, Arthur Krim.
- Three-deckers of Dorchester, Arthur Krim.
- Three Cheers for the Triple-Decker, Boston’s Iconic Cheap Housing, Anthony Flint, Bloomberg, 2023.
- Ep. 19: The Triple Decker Menace, Alex Nunes, The Publics Radio, 2019.
- 1912 Chap. 0635. An Act Relative To Tenement Houses In Towns, Boston: Secretary of the Commonwealth, 1912.
- Rediscovering the three-decker house, Howard Husock.
- Greater Boston Housing Earns “Failing Grade” in Annual Report Card, Molly Callahan, BU Today, 2022.
- REQUEST FOR IDEAS: Co-creating Boston’s Future Decker, City of Boston Mayor’s Housing Innovation Lab, 2021.
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