Triple deckers

I always tell people that I grew up in a triple decker, which is kinda-sorta true. I only lived there until I was six-and-a-half, when we moved to a modest one-family ranch on a street full of VA-loan new-builds on the street behind Winchester Avenue in Worcester. And that triple decker, with the gabled, pitched roof third floor, may technically be a two-and-a-half decker. 

In any case, it was definitely a three flat.

When I was a baby, we lived on the top floor, with the slanted ceilings in pretty much every thus-crampy room. Then the tenants on the second floor moved out, and we moved down. (Those tenants, the Deignans, now occupy a gravesite kitty-corner to where my parents, my grandmother, and my Uncle Charlie are buried.)

The third floor was never again occupied, but when I was a kid, it was a fun place to explore. As was the second floor flat, which remained empty after we moved out.

This was my grandmother's house, and although she could have used the rental income, once we decamped, Nanny and her boon companion, my feckless Uncle Charlie, stayed put on the first floor, the big old house otherwise empty. The story told was that Nanny didn't want the noise of tenants clomping around over her head, but I suspect it had more to do with the fact that my father did 100% of the maintenance, yardwork, snow shoveling, and everything else that needed to get done at 5 Winchester Avenue, including shoveling coal into the furnaces. Now he had a home and yard of his own to maintain, and could now do only 75% of the work at Nanny's that needed to get done and may not have been satisfied with whatever level attention Charlie was paying to keeping the place in shape.

Not that he had to do all that much. The heating was converted to oil, sparing Charlie for having to stir his lazy stumps and shovel coal. I believe that the only work around the house he did was mow the strip of grass that flanked the left side of the house, and scythe the clumps of grass on the steep front lawn. He must have shoveled, too. But my father dropped by to visit Nanny pretty much every day and took care of a lot of things for her.

The house I grew up in - at least until I was six-and-a-half (technically six-years-seven-months) - looked a lot different from the one in the Google Maps picture. 

For one thing, it was a dark chocolately brown with creamy yellow trim. The iron pipe railing going down the front steps looks the same, but that wrought iron design on the front porch is "new." As is the pachysandra or myrtle or whatever it is on the front lawn. We had grass tuffets, like the one that Little Miss Muffet sat on.

Whoever bought the house when my grandmother moved in with my aunt in 1974 made some "improvements" over the years. (The house, by then falling down around their ears - no surprise given that my father was dead and had been ill for many years before he died - was sold after Charlie died and Nanny no longer had his stellar companionship. Other than doing Nanny's grocery shopping - with her money - Charlie was pretty much useless. A freeloader. A low-end con man. A handsome, charming, sweet-talking rogue. But Nanny's golden boy to the end.)

For one thing, they painted the house white and pretty much dumped the trim. They replaced the retaining wall - which, in my memory was at least three feet high - with what looks like a one-footer. They closed in the two side porches (first and second floor), which were wondrous places to sit and watch the world go by. (These porches were known in Worcester parlance as "piazzas." As if.)

Somewhere along the line, we learned that, rather than do upkeep on plaster, the new owners dropped the ceilings. I suppose they replaced the toilets with new-fangled ones that didn't have the raised tank and the pull-chain flusher. I suppose they replaced that iron stove/oven, the size of a VW Beetle.

I hope they kept the pantries, the pocket doors, the hardwood floors. I hope they didn't paint over the magnificent mahogany banister in the front hallway - a hallway used once a year, on Christmas Day, when we walked down to Nanny's for dinner. Other than that, we were back entry/back stairs folks. 

I loved that house, and it holds pride of place in my Worcester memories.

But was it a true triple decker? Like this one? There were, in fact, plenty of triple deckers in my neighborhood. If you jigger with the Google Map, you can see a few of them just across Main Street from Nanny's. (As a side note: some claim that the triple decker was "invented" in Worcester by one Francis Gallagher. The claim has been disputed, but it certainly could be that some enterprising Irishman came up with the idea as a way to house his fellow Irishmen and women who were coming to Worcester in droves.)

I had friends who lived in triple deckers. I had more friends who, like me, had started out in triple deckers before their families graduated to single-family homes. I had a lot more friends whose parents had grown up in triple deckers, and whose grandparents still lived there.

My closest high school friend, Marie, live in a very nice but very small house, not all that far from the decker where her mother had grown up and where her grandfather still lived. Her mother's sister and her family lived above him. When she finished school, Marie's sister lived in a flat there.

This post on triple deckers was prompted by a recent article I saw in The Harvard Crimson. 

I don't regularly read The Crimson, although it's an excellent college paper and I do stumble across articles there every once in a while. This was one of those once in a whiles. 

The article focuses a bit on the iconic status of three deckers. Seriously, is there a movie made about working class, often criminal, Irish boyos that doesn't have triple deckers as a co-star. (C.f., as the Crimson story notes, “The Departed,” “Good Will Hunting,” and “Gone Baby Gone.”

And a bit on the history of deckers:

Historically, triple-deckers were built to house factory workers. Over time, they became a crucial form of upward mobility for working class families, especially immigrants who came to call Massachusetts home. But, as nativist sentiment in Boston grew between 1910 and 1930, the triple-decker became maligned for its association with these groups and it was slowly banned from zoning codes. (Source: The Crimson)

One of the issues wasn't just "nativist sentiment." A lot of those deckers were built quite flimsily and were fire traps. Anyway:

Today, many areas of Boston...are zoned for no more than two and a half stories. Building higher than that requires the same expensive special permission as an apartment building, making apartments a better investment for developers. 

Most of the Crimson story is about the role deckers can/will play in helping alleviate the housing crisis. They are, in fact, "poised for a comeback in many municipalities."

In 2024, the ex-urb city of Somerville okayed construction of three-unit buildings. Last year, Cambridge made four-story housing legal. Boston is debating whether to start permitting triple-deckers "— or even taller buildings —."

Will triple deckers solve the housing crisis? No, but sentimental old me welcomes their revival. There's just something about them...

But I'll end with this, the Crimson writer is named Jack Reardon. On a hunch, I gave him a google and found out that he grew up in the Boston area, and graduated from a well-known local boys Catholic high school. Now, for all I know, Jack Reardon's antecedents were lace-curtain grandees from the moment they arrived. But I'm a pretty good guesser, and I'm guessing that there's a triple decker or two in his background. 

Just sayin'.

By the way, good, well-written article, Jack.

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Image 1 Source: Google Maps
Image 2 Source: Wikipedia