connection charges were based on street frontage, so builders favored houses with as little frontage as possible. This is one reason why three-deckers are often situated on narrow lots and are rectangular shape, with the smaller sides at the front and the rear. In the textile mill city of Fall River, Massachusetts, thousands of wood-framed multi-family tenements were built by the mill owners during the boom years of the 1870s to house their workers. Many more were built by private individuals who rented their apartments to the mill workers and their families. This style of housing differed greatly from the well-spaced boardinghouses of the early 19th century built in Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, or the cottages of Rhode Island. A different three-story style apartment house is also common in urban working-class neighborhoods in northern New Jersey (particularly in and around Newark, Jersey City and Paterson). They are sometimes locally referred to as "Bayonne Boxes". Similar brick apartment buildings were built in Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s. There they are locally referred to as "Three Flats". Structure and variations Three-deckers are usually defined by the style of their roofs, being either gable, hip, or flat-roofed, with preference often varying regionally. For instance, hipped and gabled three-deckers are dominant in Worcester. In smaller cities, such as Lawrence or Albany, New York, two or two and a half story variants are common, while retaining a similar overall typology, with a bay window on the front, and prominent porches. Various external features typify the three-decker. Windows are usually located on all four sides of the building, including a street-facing bay window on each floor. Utility porches are located in the rear, and typically not visible from the street. Some three-deckers feature a single front door that access all three units; others feature one entrance for the bottom floor and one that accesses the top two. While usually lacking the ornamentation found on other homes of the Victorian era, three-deckers were sometimes build with decorative details such as porch railings and posts. Three-deckers are constructed from wood and typically use balloon framing, which makes them especially susceptible to destructive fires. Legacy Three-deckers were built in huge numbers, in some areas comprising entire neighborhoods, but by the 1950s, a number of them had been abandoned or razed because of suburban growth and urban renewal. Their reputation as poor quality and dangerous persisted into the 1970s.