Melrose Spotlight: the Triple Decker

Have you ever noticed that you don’t see many triple-deckers in Melrose? The triple-decker is one of the most distinctive architectural housing styles found in Greater Boston, yet Melrose boasts perhaps less than a dozen examples of the form. This is not an accident. This was by design.

Exactly a century ago, in 1921, the newly-formed Melrose Planning Board submitted their first zoning ordinance to the Board of Aldermen, and fear of triple-deckers was a major motivation. They wrote: “We recommend that a zoning ordinance be adopted as soon as possible. We understand that there is now being considered a plan for erecting a large number of three-flat houses on Lebanon Street near the Malden line. It has been the policy of Melrose to discourage three-flat houses. We believe that this policy has been wise, and that the erection of the above-mentioned houses will be not only a detriment to the city but also a financial burden to it.”

The next year the zoning ordinance was adopted, and triple-deckers were effectively made illegal in Melrose. Yet as the planning board’s memo made clear, Melrose had long had an informal policy “to discourage three-flat houses.”

The reason for this policy, never stated directly at the time, is obvious in retrospect: triple-deckers were associated with immigrant families, who were considered undesirable. A Boston Herald article in 1922 took note of Melrose’s new zoning ordinance against triple-deckers, and concluded “The general class of mill workers, composed for the most part of illiterate foreigners or aliens, are not attracted [to Melrose], which makes for a closer cooperation and better understanding among the people of the community.”

Triple-deckers are today beloved of city planners and homebuyers alike for their sturdy construction and for how they enable high population density at a neighborly scale. A century ago, they were considered firetraps that attracted the wrong sort of people. To note their absence in Melrose is to confront a lasting and costly historical consequence of nativism.