Triple decker

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A 'three-decker' (occassionally referred to as a triple-decker) is a three-story apartment building, usually of light-frame construction, where each floor consists of one apartment. Each apartment typically has a front and/or back porch and, because the buildings are usually freestanding, windows on all four sides.

Three-deckers were most commonly built in medium to large cities in the New England region of the United States between 1870 and 1920. The largest concentrations are in the former industrial areas of Massachusetts: Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville; Worcester; Lowell, Lawrence, and Lynn; and Brockton, Fall River, and New Bedford. The can also be found in Manchester; New Hampshire, Brattleboro, Vermont; and Portland, Maine. They are also very common in the mid-sized formerly industrial cities of Connecticut, such as Waterbury, Meriden, Willimantic, Norwich, Bristol and New Britain, as well as many sections of Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven, and some neighborhoods in Stamford and Norwalk.

They were primarily housing for the working-class and middle-class families, and ranged in price depending on their location, number of rooms, and quality of construction. They were regarded as much 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.

They were built in huge numbers, in some areas, comprising entire neighborhoods, but by the 1950s, a number of them had been abandoned or razed, due to suburban growth and urban renewal. Starting in the early 1980s, however, they became desirable again as older streetcar suburbs began to gentrify, often by buyers looking for homes where they could live in one unit and rent the other two, thus helping them pay their mortgage. As condominiums becme more common, many were converted into individually owned units.