Triple-decker houses are as indigenous to Boston as tenements are to New York, row houses to Baltimore, townhouses to Philadelphia, shotgun shacks to New Orleans or little houses to the prarie.
Triple-deckers are the characteristic residential building style in working class neighborhoods throughout the city, but particularly in the sprawling city within a city of Dorchester, itself composed of 18 neighborhoods. In Dot, as the residents refer to it, the triple dominates the cityscape that, until after the Civil War, was a rural landscape of small villages, farms and orchards supplying the needs of Boston.
The characteristics of triple-deckers are fairly simple to describe, yet they neatly solved some complex problems in domestic design and family finances that hadn't been addressed until their introduction. Qualities which remain relevant today.
Image ... Triple-deckers. St. Mark's Road, Dorchester.
To be continued ...
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