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On a quiet street 2 miles north of Boston Common, a triple-decker is being born. These three-family clapboard sugar cubes, thrown up by the tens of thousands around the turn of the 20 th century across all New England’s cities, are the backbone of Greater Boston’s working-class housing stock. Quickly built by amateur developers working off a handful of construction drawings, the wood-framed triplexes do the same thing for their neighborhoods today that they did then: provide a decent and affordable stepping stone between the city’s dim, shared quarters and a big house in the ’burbs.

Even in that heyday of urban construction, however, no triple-decker rose as qui

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