Boston's 'three-decker menace': The buildings, the builders and the dwellers, 1870s--1930 (Massachusetts).

摘要

New England's three-deckers, built between the 1870s and 1930, are three-story wooden "flats" that housed one family on each floor. This dissertation examines three-deckers not only as vernacular architecture, but also through the lens of social history, studying the people who built them, lived in them, and opposed them, to depict how a popular multifamily house was transformed into a symbol of bad housing. The study is placed within the larger contexts of the national housing reform movement, the idealization of the single-family suburban house, and the growing professionalism in architecture and city planning, and illustrates how middle-class values associated with housing and lifestyle both inspired and, ultimately, condemned these buildings.; Boston provides a unique backdrop because wooden three-deckers were prohibited in the city center by fire limits and were generally not legislated as tenements; Boston also was the home of the movement to ban them. The first chapter sets the scene in the mid-nineteenth century, when a severe housing shortage helped create a demand for multifamily dwellings. The moral dimensions of the housing problem are established through a careful reading of the ambivalence toward multifamily housing and the increasing association of tenements with the poor. The second chapter explores the origins of three-deckers, interpreting their development as an attempt to marry multifamily occupancy with the suburban ideal of detached single family houses. Original drawings of floor plans are analyzed to trace the influence of middle-class principles of spatial organization. Chapter Three identifies the architects and builders of Boston's three-deckers and shows how the professionalization of architecture changed their roles and discredited them as speculative builders. Chapter Four compares three-deckers and their occupants in different parts of Boston, elucidating distinctions between working-class and middle-class three-deckers. Chapter Five uses oral histories and information from census returns to illustrate how three-deckers fostered a sense of community that bolstered their popularity. The final chapter develops the reasons behind the demise of three-deckers: the economic obstacles, the prejudices against immigrants and multifamily living which shaped the movement to ban three-deckers, and the promotion of single-family houses, which created an environment hostile to three-deckers.