GONZÁLEZ: Hey, everybody. I’m Ana.

NUNES: I’m Alex. And you’re listening to Mosaic.

GONZÁLEZ: OK. So, in the last episode of Mosaic we followed the early history of the New England triple decker home.

NUNES: In this episode, we hear from people who lived in triple deckers in the mid-part of the 20th Century after their families migrated to the U.S. from places like Portugal, Italy, and Canada. 

GONZÁLEZ: We hear what life was like inside the walls of the triple decker in a time when life seemed much simpler, but was actually pretty complicated.

MARIANNE: My name is Marianne Gianfrancesco.

REA: Rea Bouchard-Powers.

LOU: Lou Nunes.

LYDIA: My name is Lydia Costa.

MARY: Mary Madeiros.

VASCO: Vasco J. Massa. I’m the younger brother.

GREG: I’m Lydia’s son. My name is Greg Costa. 

MARIANNE: My grandfather, grandmother, and aunt lived on the first floor. My father’s brother and his family lived on second floor. And we lived on third floor.

LOU: The rooms were separated into a bedroom for the boys, a bedroom for the girls, and there were three of each of us. If you looked at it now, it’d be ridiculously cramped. But when we were kids, it just didn’t feel that way.

VASCO: My God. We would have to share the same bedroom. Me and my brothers sometimes bang into each other, you know?

LYDIA: We couldn’t all have a meal at the same time, because we didn’t all fit at the table, so we took turns.

MARY: I have the picture. This is all of us. It’s 15 people.

MARIANNE: There were always people around and people watching out for you, watching out for your well-being. The double-edged sword is that there was no place to hide.

GREG: I can remember I would just feel so confined in here, because everyone would just pour in, so I’d often escape with the cousins to the basement.

MARIANNE: One of my cousins and some of his friends, my mother could see them playing in this little plot of land. They struck matches, and the little plot of land went up in flames. My mother went downstairs immediately and told my aunt. And he got [laughs]...Oh, I shouldn’t be laughing. He got a spanking with--if anyone is listening and grew up Italian American, they know what the wooden spoon means.

LOU: The only place you had privacy was the bathroom. But we used to take a bath once a week. It wasn’t like it is now. There was no shower.

REA: Little primitive. We had no tubs. We had no showers. Not to sound indelicate, but when you had a date on Saturday night and you’re in your room bathing from a little basin of water, and your date arrived early and he’s standing there in the kitchen, watching you walking past with your scummy bathwater--not a good way to start a date, no.

MARIANNE: I do remember going up and down those tenement stairs when my mother needed some sugar or my aunt needed something from my mother, and they could depend on each other for those kinds of things. 

REA: We didn’t have a phone in the house. They had a phone downstairs, so anyone that wanted to reach us would call the Armstrongs downstairs. And that water pipe that went from downstairs through each separate kitchen all the way up, they’d clang on the pipe. Just like that song “Knock Three Times on the Ceiling.” Well, we used to use the waterpipe.

MARY: My mother was a storyteller. She used to tell us Snow White and the Dwarfs in Portuguese. 

LYDIA: And sometimes she invented her own stories.

REA: Our place was the gathering place for all the friends. Card playing was a big thing. You name it, we played it.

MARIANNE: We had Monopoly tournaments that lasted all day. 

REA: Any night of the week, you had probably five, six, eight extra people there. There was always a game of cards at the table, and my mother would make big pizzas.

LOU: My parents were Portuguese immigrants, and they didn’t like kids coming around. So my dad would, you know we would be embarrassed. He worked hard on construction. The last thing he wanted to do was put up with his own kids, let alone the neighborhood kids. They’d be there, and he’d say, “What do you want, huh? Ah, get screw,” meaning get lost. He’d confuse it. He’d say, “Get over here. Gone home.” Those were his favorite words.

GREG: The house I grew up in was single family, so I was kind of a loner over there, just doing my own thing. But then I would come over here and it would be spent entirely with family and the other kids. 

LYDIA: If we were together with my mother, we would probably do some singing. 

MARY: We can sing it. [Singing in Portuguese.] 

VASCO: She would play the “Star Spangled Banner” too. Yeah. Like the notes and stuff, yeah.

LYDIA: The thing was, when we started to pray, it didn’t matter if you had company or not. So if your friends were here, you had a choice, either go home or stay and pray, and many people prayed here because they opted to stay with us.

LOU: Every night, we prayed the rosary as a family together. And anyone who was home--it didn’t matter who you were or how old you were. And everybody would be kneeling at the foot of a bed, and my dad would eventually be falling asleep on his side of the bed, periodically getting nudged to wake up.

LOU: We had a black and white TV that was probably 16 inches. I don’t know, 20 inch.

MARY: We used to watch.

LYDIA: "Lawrence Welk Show."

MARY: "Lawrence Welk Show," yes. And that one with Bob Barker.

LOU: Ranger Andy. He was on at four o’clock.

LOU: And every now and then he’d ask the kids if they knew a joke. They were usually some lame kids joke. But I do remember, because this was live, and a little kid telling a dirty joke essentially. Ranger Andy cut away from his joke real quick, but it made it live on TV. Maybe it was something about--anyway, no I don’t remember the exact joke.

LOU: We would all just gather in the street.

MARY: We used to sit outside on the steps altogether and talk.

LOU: Play stickball, tag, and ring-a-levio, and red rover, red rover, come over.

MARIANNE: Everybody’s mother sent them outside all the time. The fun of that, even as I was complaining about the cold weather in the winter, was that there was always somebody around to play with.

LYDIA: We’d get out and build snowmen.

MARY: Sled down the park.

MARIANNE: Hide and seek, and the boys played manhunt.

LOU: We used to play basketball in the backyard and the cars would get in the way. The ball would hit my father’s car, and he didn’t like that. He came out with a jackknife and stuck it through the basketball, and the kid up the street demanded my father replace the ball, and my father just told him to get lost. Not too many people would come to the house.

MARIANNE: The girls were not able to do the same things that the boys could do. 

LOU: They were very protective of the girls. 

MARIANNE: The boys could get on their bicycles and take off for the day. There was much more close supervision on the girls.

LOU: I remember my sister. Her boyfriend would walk her home from school. And this was seventh, eighth grade. And my dad got ahold of this, and he walked behind the kid, kicked him in the pants and told him to go home and leave his daughter alone.

LOU: The gals and the guys, we all hung together.

LOU: We used to have our own little dances in people’s backyards. We would play forty-fives and pop music. You know Top 40. The Monkees. You know, all the bands.

REA: A lot of dancing and singing, and rock and roll.

REA: There was Elvis Presley, who my dad absolutely hated, just like all adults were taught to.

MARIANNE: My mother had this vision that one of her two children would become accomplished musicians and perhaps sometimes play at Carnegie Hall. That never came to being, but I did play the piano for a number of years when I was a girl.

MARIANNE: “Moon River” from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” My father’s mother particularly loved hearing me. And sometimes she would come upstairs and just sit in the parlor, as we called it, and listen to me play.

REA: The first thing in the budget was food. 

MARIANNE: My grandmother would make homemade pasta every Monday. 

LOU: On Mondays, my mother would make a huge vat of soup. It was known as Monday soup. And if you have Monday soup for 52 weeks a year for five years, Monday soup is not very palatable. 

MARIANNE: On her bed she had a white sheet that was only saved for this purpose. And, on the white sheet, she layed out all the fresh made pasta that she had crafted that day. And it would dry out, and then she’d divvy that up among the three floors. 

LOU: And then, on Tuesday, we had leftover Monday soup. That wasn’t too good either. And we would literally flush it down the toilet and I’d make French fries. 

LYDIA: A lot of Portuguese soup, fish.

VASCO: Sweet potatoes, chouriç, potatoes, chicken. But it was good, though.

REA: Most of her food was good, but she had some--a couple of hideous failures. I can still remember the smell: open the door downstairs, and it was like, “Oh, my God. She’s making baked beans.” She wasn’t raised around here. She didn’t know Boston Baked Beans. 

LOU: My mom kept a, especially upstairs, a home that was spick and span.

REA: My mother was an impeccable housekeeper. She lived for her house ‘til the day she died. 

MARIANNE: You could eat off the floor.

LOU: And we all had our chores.

MARIANNE: Women were competitive with each other, almost catty about who had the cleanest home. They were very, very proud of that. 

LOU: My sister used to dust a little statue of Jesus. And he had kind of like a gown over him. And so my oldest sister was cleaning, dusting, so she lifted up the gown. And my mom must have seen her do that. So, the next week when she went to dust, Jesus suddenly had underwear.

MARIANNE: When I think of it: what pressure on the women! Everything was a reflection of the woman: their children were a reflection of the woman; their house was a reflection of the woman; how sociable their husband was was a reflection of them. Women just had to be these cheery figures of loveliness at all times, and it was very difficult.

MARY: Christmas time, everybody used to come here.

REA: My parents would come and wake us up: “Santa Claus came. Sata came. Santa came.”

MARY: She made rice pudding. And she made, maybe you heard, massa suvada, sweet bread.

MARIANNE: It was a food fest. It was a family fest.

REA: And we’d all get up in the middle of the night and tear into the packages and stuff, and then they wanted us to go back to bed until morning so that they could get some sleep.

MARIANNE: Not a lot of money. So it wasn’t so much about the gifts. It was about everybody being together. 

REA: One year. I think it was Christmas Eve. The radio was on. And my father loved good singing, and he heard a Christmas song being sung, and he just stopped dead in his tracks, and he listened. And when it was done, he said, “What a beautiful voice.” We said, “That was Elvis Presley!” And he was just flabbergasted. 

GONZÁLEZ: Many people who grew up in triple deckers obviously have these really nostalgic memories of what it was like.

NUNES: But reality is that a lot of it was pretty tough.

GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. Really tough. The immigrants who came before them at the turn of the century and moved into triple deckers faced discrimination, and this new generation did too.

RAY: There was racial, ethnic discrimination every place you looked in this town.

NUNES: This is Ray Rickman. He’s a researcher and author, and the executive director of Stages of Freedom Bookstore in Providence.

RAY: There isn’t an Italian-American, 50, 60, 70 years old who will not tell you about bad experiences they had as a kid in the 50s, 60s, 70s. They were brought here to work in factories and that’s all they were supposed to do. They weren’t supposed to live near you. They weren’t supposed to interact with you, whoever you were.

GONZÁLEZ: And by the mid-20th Century, many people living in triple deckers around New England wanted out of the cities.

MARC: It was a brilliant stroke of genius on the part of business people to convince the American public that the cities were no longer desirable places to live.

NUNES: This is Marc Levitt. He’s a documentary filmmaker currently working on a film called “Triple Decker, A New England Love Story.” 

MARC: There was, in many ways, an increasing need to create a new America, at least for quote white people, driven by the car and that loved the suburban split level house. And there was a sense to which you were delivered to heaven.

MARIANNE: That idea of moving from a tenement house to a single family dwelling was really considered an accomplishment.

REA: I was moving out. I was getting married. 

MARIANNE: For my parents, it was a sense that we were moving on up.

REA: No, I never missed it. We had a bathtub where I went to! 

MARRIANE: It was exciting setting up the house and watching my mom put the new curtains up and all of that. And then I absolutely remember feeling a sense of--it was different. And I didn’t know that it was a sense of loneliness. And then, one Saturday morning, I woke up, and I could hear this raucous laughing and giggling and teasing. And in the basement, was my mom and my aunts. And there was a family wedding coming up, and so they were there, in the basement, making Italian pastries and cookies for the wedding. And that was the first time I realized how much I missed all of that. 

LYDIA: I never felt like I moved out completely. 

GREG: Not much has changed since I was a kid. I mean, even that plant that’s right there has been around since I was born.

MARY: Yeah, that plant never dies. Yup.

GREG: And, I mean, definitely when I’m here I’m just reminded of my childhood, so I’m taken back to some of the happiest points of my life. 

MARIANNE: I feel blessed, at least for me, to have had that kind of an environment when I was that young. I can’t say that if I were living in that house right now I would have that same experience. I certainly do think that was then and this is now.

LYDIA: It’s a good feeling that we have the house. We have tangible things that were my parents’. My brother, this is his floor, his apartment, but he lets us in. He’s never said, “Don’t come in.” Even if the door is locked, we can come in…

MARY: Through the back.

LYDIA: It is comforting to have the house that you came to. The house that my parents lived in and worked so hard for. 

VASCO: Maybe I’ll put up a sign: “Don’t come in if I’m singing!” [Laughter]

GONZÁLEZ: That was Lydia Costa, Mary Madeiros, Vasco J. Massa, and Greg Costa, interviewed in their family’s triple decker home in Fall River, Massachusetts. 

NUNES: You also heard Marianne Gianfrancesco, who grew up in Providence, Rea Bouchard-Powers, originally of Manville, Rhode Island, and my dad, Lou Nunes. He was raised in a three family home in Hartford, Connecticut. And for the record, always let me and my friends play basketball in the driveway.

GONZÁLEZ: In the next episode of Mosaic, we take a look at the New England triple decker one more time but from a different perspective. 

NUNES: The story of the triple decker today isn’t what it was a hundred years ago, or 50 years ago.

GONZÁLEZ: Some are condemned and falling apart. Others are being remade into condos in gentrified neighborhoods. 

NUNES: So if the triple decker once symbolized the American Dream for immigrants, what is it now, and what’s the future of the three decker home? We’ll unpack that question in episode 21 of Mosaic.

GONZÁLEZ: Mosaic is a production of The Public’s Radio, edited by Sally Eisele with production help from James Baumgartner and Aaron Selbig. Our original music is by Bryn Bliska. Torey Malatia is the general manager of The Public’s Radio. I’m Ana Gonzalez.

NUNES: And I’m Alex Nunes. Thanks for listening.