How triple-decker living gave the Taveras family a place to thrive in America

PROVIDENCE – With snow still falling, former Providence Mayor Angel Taveras pulls up in front of the three-story apartment house on Potters Avenue he grew up in, then, recognizing the unplowed street conditions, says he’s going to park behind the adjacent three-decker: “My cousin lives there.”

Until recently, his late aunt lived there, too. “I lived there my senior year in high school because my mom was in Florida, so I lived with my aunt so I could finish [at] Classical.”

Between his aunt’s green triple-decker and the beige three-story apartment house his parents bought, these were the “anchors,” he says, for the extended Taveras family arriving from the Dominican Republic during the 1960s and 1970s.

“This is the first house I remember living in when I was maybe 4 or 5,” he says of his parents' old house. “I say that because there were other triple-deckers we lived in. But my parents bought this one.  My grandmother lived on the third floor, we were on the first floor. I had uncles and aunts as they started to come over living on the second. So, it was like our whole family. “

A foothold in America

His story illustrates the important role triple-deckers played in American immigration in many industrial cities of New England.

Standing on his cousin’s porch, Taveras says, “My father came over first in the 1960s to New York, to Brooklyn. He then brought over my mom and my sister. And they brought over everybody. They brought over my four grandparents, and they brought over 22 aunts and uncles.”

Here on Potters Avenue, his arriving relatives had a secure footing to start new lives: a place to live, always plenty to eat between the two houses, and good-paying jobs 1½ miles away at Esposito Jewelry.

“Esposito Jewelry was like a place where people would land. So you had a good job, way better than they were making over there [in the Dominican], and they were able to buy houses based on that.”

Angel Taveras graduated from Classical High School in 1988, then Harvard University with honors. He went on to earn a law degree from Georgetown University and became the first Hispanic mayor of Providence in 2010.

Now in private practice, he lives in the suburbs, in Lincoln, with his wife, Farah, and their three children.

His mother recently moved to the suburbs, too, to a small house in Cranston.

“Like so many others,” he says, “she can now say, ‘I used to live in Providence.’”

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Triple-deckers were oasis for immigrant family of ex-Providence mayor