History
Three-deckers were most commonly built in the emerging industrial cities of the New England region of the United States between 1870 and 1920. There are large concentrations in the former industrial areas of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, northern New Jersey, and some parts of Connecticut. They can also be found in cities in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Virginia.
They were primarily housing for the working-class and middle-class families, often in multiple rows on narrow lots in the areas surrounding the factories. They were regarded as more livable than their brick and stone tenement and row house counterparts in other Northeastern cities, as they allowed for airflow and light on all four sides of each building, and are similar to the three-story brick apartments built in Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s.
In the textile mill city of Fall River, Massachusetts, thousands of wood-framed multi-family tenements were built by the mill owners during the boom years of the 1870s to house their workers. Many more were built by private individuals who rented their apartments to the mill workers and their families. This style of housing differed greatly from the well-spaced boardinghouses of the early 19th century built in Lowell and Lawrence or the cottages of Rhode Island.
In Worcester, Massachusetts sewer connection charges were based on street frontage, so builders favored houses with as little frontage as possible, This is one reason why three-deckers are often situated on narrow lots and are in rectangular shape, with the smaller sides at the front and the rear.
It is estimated that by 1920, the city of Boston had over 15,000 triple decker houses. Areas such as Jamaica Plain and Dorchester were popular with the emerging middle class, and became "streetcar suburbs" as transportation systems expanded from the older, core sections of the city. Typically, the affordable triple decker homes attracted live-in landlords who would collect rent from the other two apartments.
The triple-decker style apartment house is also prolific in urban areas of New Jersey especially in the cities of (and smaller cities surrounding) Newark and Jersey City but are scattered throughout working-class neighborhoods of most of North Jersey. They are typically referred to as "Bayonne Boxes" in the region as they are popular in Bayonne, New Jersey as well.
Read more about this topic: Triple Decker
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)