A Theree Decker is a 3-family house, built of wood, with front porches. You can see them in and around the Boston, Fall River, Worcester MA areas…and a few in San Francisco. They were bult from about 1890-1920, and there are thousands of them still around. My Grandparents had one…and they were very practical houses…each flat hafd 3 bedrooms, a living room, a dinng room, and a large kitchen(in the back). They were spacious and comfotable…unless you lived on the 3rd floor …those stairs were a lot of work.
Anyway, I’ve never seen this style of house in Chicago, or Minneapolis, or any western city…except for a few in the older neighborhoods of SF.
Anybody know why?
It’s just a guess, but modern building codes might have somrthing to do with it. Once a residence goes more than two stories or is more than a two-family dwelling, it will be required to have at least a 1-hour fire protection on everything, plus restrictions on how many windows and doors, egress requirements, etc., also the designers and contractors who are well versed in these requirements are more expensive to employ; sometimes the plans must be drawn by a registered engineer or architect, not just a drafter. Many other requirements besides fire resistance also come into play for three-family or three-story residences.
Racine, WI had some houses that are similar to what you discribe. I lived on the first floor of one built around 1890. It had a large kitchen, large dining room large living room with den attached, one huge bedroom and one very small bedroom. I would have to guess the second floor was similar, and as for the third I have no idea. The only difference I can see is that I’ve always guessed it didn’t start out that way. I’ve always sort of felt that it started out as a one family (or maybe two) house and that the inside was redone to support more families possible during depression time. I’m also going to guess that it was designed with live in servents in mind. If you go to shorewest.com and search for #736593 you’ll find a house similar to the one I lived in. You’d have to imagine the porch on the left side extending to the edge of the house and a more ‘full sized’ third floor. It was a very nice comfortable house to live in.
I think that part of the reason you see so much triple-decker housing in particular areas of the Northeast is that it is ‘mill housing’ put up by companies for their workers. It is a nice apartment building design, I feel, so I have no explanation for why you don’t see it in more places across the country. Maybe in the Midwest and West there was less need to save space by building three-families?
Homes like these are all over the cities of Southern Ontario. My grandparents lived in one - three storeys plus unfinished basement. There were thousands and thousands of them built in Hamilton and older sections of Toronto - Cabbagetown, for instance.
This isn’t going to help much but when I opened the thread, I was going to reply with Massachusetts and San Francisco. You have those covered. I have traveled all over the U.S. and those are the only two places that sprang to mind. I am sure that you can find isolated examples elsewhere but those two are the only ones that I have seen with a large concentration.
I can’t add to the list, but I wanted to note that when I read The Great Railway Bazaar, the author (Scott Turow?) compaed the triple-deckers of Somerville, MA to the slums of India. I was living in a triple-decker in Medford, MA at the time.
AFAIK, around Boston they are always “three deckers” not “triple deckers”. As the area has changed over the past 30 years people are using triple more, but locally it’s always “three deckers”.
Wicked nice houses, though.
Older parts of St. Louis has houses similar to these, but the porches are on the back. Is that the same thing? Maybe a regional variation?
Lots of older houses in New Jersey are three decker. I once lived on the entire third floor of one. Usually they are colonials–kitchen, dining and living rooms on the first floor, bedrooms and baths upstairs.
I’ve been living in Boston for 15 years and I don’t think I’ve ever heard them called “3-deckers.” It’s always triple-deckers. I must be a different part of Boston than you are in!
I’m curious – is it the fact that these buildings are three stories that make them unique? There are plenty of buildings in Detroit that are similar to your description, only they’re usually brick, and usually two stories.
I may have seen three-story versions around, but I might be fooling myself. I’m trying to think where I might have seen them, but I’m coming up empty. Let me think on it.
Wow, OMG, that sounds exactly like the house I grew up in the Kirkendale neighborhood of Hamilton, Ontario. 
Of course, by the time my family got to it, it was no longer being used as a triplex, but you could still see the signs, and a number of other traits mentioned here check out.
Front porch - check
Unfinished basement - check.
Let’s see now, when you came in the front door from the porch, there was another doorway that led into the ground floor ‘flat’ or a step up to a landing and the first staircase. The ground floor had its own vestibule, a hallway leading back through the house, bathroom, kitchen, living room, dining room, and two other rooms that could be used as bedrooms. There was a door in the first-floor kitchen that took you down stairs to the back door and the basement.
When the first stairway got up to the second floor, there were two doors there, one that led to the second floor, and one that led to the staircase for the third floor. Second floor had a hallway, a HUGE bathroom, (friends of mine commented that it was the largest they’d ever seen,) and five other rooms, one of which we were told used to be the second floor kitchen. (The only evidence of this left was a sink, and a wide flat space that I believe we used as a computer desk, but might have originally been a kitchen counter.)
The third floor had a small connecting hall at the top of the stairs, a small kitchen and bathroom, one bedroom, and a large space that we used as a rec room or a second living room/dining room. When I was very young my grandmother was living in the third floor as a little private apartment, and then my sister got to move into the bedroom up there, and my mom started taking it over once she went away to college.
My parents sold that house… wow, over nine years ago I guess. 
I’d never heard of it as cheap housing for the factory workers, but that makes some sense I guess. (They’d have a bit of a commute to get down to the waterfront, but hey.)
That’s not the same kind of triple-decker that is common in Boston. Here, each floor is its own separate self-contained apartment. There is no upstairs for any of them.
There are also “double triple-deckers,” which are like two triple-deckers attached in the middle. Six apartments all together, each one taking up the entire floor on its own side.
Three-deckers were mini-apartment buildings, consisting of three “flats,” each on a separate floor, comprising three single-family dwelling units in one building.
That houses happened to be three stories tall didn’t make them three-deckers; rather, it was the three-apartments-in-what-looked-like-a-large-house style that did it.
It’s much like my family home was a double house – not a “duplex.” A duplex was structured like a “two-family three-decker” – two apartments on separate floors. Our house was built as a single structure, with the ground floor and upstairs bedroom areas divided into two separete dwelling units, but with shared attic and cellar areas (both semi-finished).
There’s a good book on the subject.
The folks in Lynn MA (2 or so towns north of Boston, depending on how you travel) that I know (family) have always called them triple-deKAHS 
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My grandfather (dad’s dad) once relayed the story of he and his 9 siblings sharing 2 of the bedrooms in one while growing up. My own family (parents and self) lived in one when we returned from military duty overseas. They tended to have a stairway on the front and back, entrances to each level, with each level having a porch that overlooked the street. The first floor shared their porch as an common entry to the rest of the building.
Common in the mill towns of New England, and can be found in MA/NH and I’d assume the other NE towns of similar type. They tend to be in the more “economically challenged” neighborhoods now, though they were once thought of as “middle class” neighborhoods. I assume most of those folks fled in a manner similar to that of my extended family.
-Butler