Boston's Three-Deckers:
The Beauty and the Blight

Story and Photos by Chris Lovett

(This article was originally published in the Dorchester Reporter, in June, 2001)

My father grew up in a three-decker on East Street.

Stacked with its neighbors on a slope of Meeting House Hill facing Dorchester Bay, the house is easy to miss. There’s white trim, and the asbestos siding is a washed-out gray, with the texture of a grindstone. Just inside the chain-link fence, the front yard looks carefully tended. There isn’t a speck of trash, except for the barrels lined up in tight formation and branded with the address.

To judge by appearances, this could almost be the same house William Morse sold in 1918 for the equivalent of $5,400 to Nellie and Patrick Lovett. They were Irish immigrants from County Kerry, and this was the first home they bought in America. The people who live in the house today are also immigrants. Some of the names on the mailbox are from Cape Verde, others from Vietnam. In a new century, it seems, the story has come full circle. People come and go, cycles go up and down, but three-deckers endure—for some as a gateway to opportunity, for others as a source of irritation.

 Standing on the front porch at the house on East Street, I ring the doorbell for the owner, who lives on the same floor where my grandparents had lived with their six children and one of my grandmother’s relatives. After a while, an elderly woman in a kerchief opens the door and we try to converse. The most I can manage are a few words in Spanish that don’t even come close to Portuguese.

If a Dorchester three-decker in the 21^st century can be a different world for me, then so was the world of my grandparents. The first image of Patrick Lovett we have in our family shows him as a carpenter, one of six men standing in formation with tools in hand. The image looks almost too formal to be a photograph. My grandfather holds an axe and a brace with a drill bit. The hem of his jacket looks blown back by the wind, but nothing will stop him from holding his pose. The workmen behave as if an artist is doing their portrait, but what they face is nothing more than a traveling photographer—one more workman engaged in a mechanical act of reproduction. 

For many, that was the problem with three-deckers: they were look-alike housing, not so much built as reproduced.  That’s how they appeared to the first pastor of my grandparents’ parish, St. Peter’s. Rev. Peter Ronan was “heartily applauded” when he called for keeping these houses off one of Dorchester’s last remaining pieces of large open space, at Savin Hill. According to an account of his speech at the Dorchester Day Banquet in 1907, he “told of how three-apartment houses are being built all over the district, and said we did not want such things to mar the spot where the first settlers of the now great district landed.”

In his study of  neighborhood development, Streetcar Suburbs, Sam Bass Warner, Jr. described “cramped streets” of three-deckers that turned the yearning for picturesque houses and garden lots into an “ugly joke.” In The Second Settlement 1875-1925, architectural historian Douglass Shand Tucci tells how three-deckers were despised for destroying the earlier “garden city.” He agrees that three-deckers were a different kind of building—a mutation of the row house—and that they had some flaws, such as turning corners badly. “But,” he also cautioned, “what destroyed the garden city was cheap three-deckers – and cheap singles and cheap doubles.”

The “Second Settlement” was a time of enormous change in Dorchester, when the population of the former town went from about 12,000 at the time of its annexation to Boston in 1870 to more than 150,000 by 1920. Feeding the population growth and the proliferation of three-deckers was the expansion of streetcar service, which made Dorchester affordable to a commuting lower middle class. The waves of growth also produced a sequence of building styles traced in a report for the Boston Landmarks Commission by Arthur J. Krim: formative prototypes, followed by the “Early Classic Period,” a “Late Classic Period,” and finally a less imaginative “Functional Period.”

Where some saw uniformity in Victorian three-deckers, Krim saw “pure fancy” and “individuality of spirit.” He found three-decker streetscapes to be “highly creative” and, in the Early Classic period from 1900 to 1910, he admired a “a marvelous expression of the builder’s art and a major source of Dorchester’s appeal." 

Just as three-deckers were meant to be seen in groups, they were also meant to link people beyond limits of the nuclear family.

My father’s older sister, Mary M. Lovett, still remembers the two quiet families who lived above and below on East Street. There was one time when the girls in the floor above got a bit noisy and my grandfather sent Mary upstairs to have them quiet down. Instead, they made fun of her, chanting, “Papa Lovett wants us to keep quiet.” Mary came back and told her father, “I’m never going up there again.”

When people on the other floors were members of the same extended family, the effect could be quite different. Take the example of the 27 year-old president of the Columbia-Savin Hill Civic Assn., Annissa Essaibi. She lives in a three-decker with relatives going back two generations. Essaibi’s grandparents, who were immigrants from Poland, bought the house 45 years ago. Her grandfather did television repairs and used part of the first floor for his business.

“The house was always full,” says Essaibi. “There’s always someone home, there’s always something to eat.”

  Essaibi makes a connection between life in a cluster of Dorchester three-deckers and the village where her father grew up in Tunisia. In her own village bordering Dorchester Avenue, there are her sister’s friends running in and out of the house, neighbors putting away each other’s trash barrels, some of them living in the area for 30, 40 or 50 years. And, on Dorchester Day, there’s a balcony view of the parade from the porch.

      “It forces people to be close—being so physically close,” she says.

A few years after moving into the house on East Street, my grandfather began to buy more property in Dorchester, possibly with the help of money from his wife’s sale of property in Ireland. During the early and mid-1920’s he bought as many as a dozen properties a year, from Neponset Avenue to Buttonwood Street and Milton Avenue. But when the Depression came, he lost everything, including the house on East Street.

       In Krim’s history, there were many builders who went bankrupt, as the production of three-deckers all but came to a stop around 1930. Real estate consultant John Anderson points to another factor: a 1929 change in zoning, which discouraged three-deckers by imposing new requirements for depth and frontage. By the time the building was over, three-deckers had practically defined the texture of a whole city. Even in 1970, the Boston Redevelopment Authority reported, one-to-four family homes—chiefly three-deckers—accounted for three-fifths of the city’s housing stock.

By 1970, three-deckers were my father’s concern. As a district chief in the Boston Fire Dept. stationed on Meeting House Hill, he saw them burn. According to the BRA, during the 1970’s the city lost more than 7,300 units of 1-4 family housing. Among the causes often cited:  federal policies that encouraged migration to the suburbs, mortgage and insurance discrimination, urban renewal and busing. One report for the BRA placed the “era of throwaway housing” between 1950 and 1980. In his study of Catholics and Jews in Boston, Urban Exodus, Gerald Gamm looks back even further, to the arrival of the automobile.

Among the more immediate causes was a program to provide mortgages to African-American homebuyers at below-market rates and with small down payments. The Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (BBURG) introduced the program in 1968, on the heels of unrest following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The program operated within a set of boundaries from the South End and Jamaica Plain on the west and as far east as Dorchester Avenue and Adams Street.

One effect of the BBURG program was a form of racial steering. BBURG homebuyers were also saddled with the expenses of older housing and an economic downturn in the early 1970’s. The result was a wave of foreclosures. Banks faced with a weak market, and reimbursed by the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), had little incentive to look for new buyers. With an inventory of abandoned housing, much of it three-deckers, HUD became Dorchester’s largest slumlord.

Each house that burned was a threat to its neighbors, so people turned out at community meetings to get buildings torn down or boarded up. Many of the meetings were organized by Dorchester Fair Share, which also pressured City Hall to stop the over-assessments that added to the burden of rising property taxes and declining property values. It was after one Fair Share meeting in 1976 that a housing expert predicted the decline would only get worse. With a sweep of his arm from Bowdoin Street toward Columbia Road, he said, “In ten years, this will all be prairie.”

The losses might have been greater, if not for government incentives, mainly for owner-occupants, to fix up and maintain older housing.  Though three-deckers continued to attract speculators who did little to improve them, they also attracted people who saw their value, whether as a home or a badge of identity worn proudly on tee-shirts.

Before the end of the 1980’s, the BRA reports were more alarmed about a vanishing supply of affordable housing. By the early 1990’s, there would be another slump in the housing market, though without a heavy loss in supply.

Figures for last year show the effects of prolonged recovery. By the third quarter, the city’s Dept. of Neighborhood Development reports, the median sale price for a three-decker in Dorchester was $228,000. That was up from 1999 figure by 27%, but still among the most affordable in Boston.

The executive director of Mass. Affordable Housing alliance, Thomas Callahan, says there are still some three-deckers within reach for buyers with a household income as low as $25,000.

“The affordability level,” he says, “is unparalleled as far as being able to reach down into the low and moderate income population.”

Much of the affordability comes from tenants in a strong rental market, though it’s increasingly common to find three-deckers on the market one unit at a time as condominiums. But three-deckers still face some resistance from the secondary mortgage market. The director of the Fannie Mae Partnership Office in Boston, Robin Drill, says the reason is trends in mortgage defaults throughout the northeast, more so among absentee-owned properties, and especially during the slump of the early 1990’s. Since that time, Drill says, Fannie Mae has backed financing of three-decker purchases at a “much greater rate.”

“There’s much more activity now,” she says, “because we’ve figured out how to deal with the risk.”

If, in some ways, three-deckers are the great bargain they were a century ago, other things have changed. The executive director of Nuestra Comunidad Development Corp., Evelyn Friedman Vargas, notes the owners of three-deckers are less likely to be renting to relatives, while their tenants have more rights in a legal dispute.

“Now you have to go through a long process,” she says, “and, as a result, a landlord could be out of that rent for six months.”

Nuestra Comunidad is among the non-profit groups that have built housing on the vacant lots that sprang up in Roxbury and Dorchester in the 1960’s through 1980’s. Though the group has rehabilitated three-deckers, Friedman-Vargas says, it has avoided them in new construction—partly because of resistance by neighborhood residents.

“You have people who just don’t want to have rental housing,” she says. And that even applies to two-family houses.

“Many of the people who come out to these meetings, they themselves own two- or three-family houses that they live in,” she says, “but they didn’t want any more in their neighborhood.”

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