12705 Three Decker bollard at Edward Everett Square, 2012.
Dorchester Illustration no. 2389 Bollard of Three Decker
The sculptures on top of bollards at Edward Everett Square, located in the plaza with the bronze pear sculpture, represent themes connecting Dorchester’s past and present.
One of the pieces of artwork is a bronze three-decker representing all the multi-family houses throughout Dorchester. Although three deckers are not unique to Dorchester, Dorchester’s developers did fall in love with the form, producing over 5,000 of them from the 1880s until the three-decker was prohibited by the city in or about 1930 due to the fear of fire spreading quickly among closely-spaced wooden buildings. Many residents of Dorchester and former residents recall growing up in an apartment filling a whole floor of one of these buildings. The keys in the sculpture suggest home and personal space. Encompassing from 900 to 1300 square feet of floor space, an apartment in a three-decker is as large as a ranch house in the suburbs.
The City of Boston’s website has this comment: “Three deckers first began to appear in Boston just before the turn of the 20th century. Based on the construction principles of three-decker ships, three deckers are designed to maximize living space on rectangular city lots and were built so that the apartments, stacked one atop another, extended back into the lot, with rooms opening up one on to the other.
The fronts of the houses featured stacked porches between columns, purposely created to encourage the owners of the properties to take advantage of the fresh air. Houses were constructed with windows designed to cross-ventilate the structure during long, humid city summers. Many triple deckers also had back porches as well, giving the families who lived in them even more outside space.”
http://www.cityofboston.gov/3D/whatis/history.asp
The term triple decker is rumored to be an invention of the BRA, while older Dorchesterites always use the term three decker. Three deckers may have begun as early as the 1870s and lasted throughout the 1920s. The Boston Landmarks Commission published an excellent piece in 1977: Three-Deckers of Dorchester: An Architectural Historical Survey by Arthur J. Krim. Krim says “The three-deckers are a large part of the identity of Dorchester and define its sense of place.” Krim says that Dorchester has the largest collection of three-deckers of any community anywhere. You may view the introduction to this document at
http://www.sidewalkmemories.org/archives/The%20Three-Deckers%20of%20Dorchester.pdf
The outlawing of three deckers may have been the result of negative feelings about the types of people who would be likely to live in them as much as a fear of fire. Some believe that class issues were part of the reason the three-decker form was banned as a building type.
Krim suggested stylistic differences by geographic distribution; others have pointed out influences from other periods such as Queen Anne revival or Colonial revival.