As they went up Yale Street and she passed the homes, Umbertina recognized something in their construction. Brick pillars along the walk would be topped with cement and then studded with rocks, the largest set in the center as a finial. It was as if her countrymen were exalting the very rocks that had caused their poverty in the fields of Italy and of which they had built their hovels. Here their ancient enemy was rendered harmless and stuck into the walls that surrounded their homes like captive totems.

Some of the original wood houses of the area had brick facades added onto them and the grace of arches. The brick was worked with open designs and a pattern above the archways; or patterned cement was shaped into squat, square columns supporting a balcony-porch. Most homes were built in stucco—plain, homely, facing the street guardedly in their homeliness and knowing that they were strong enough, impenetrable enough, not to care about prettiness. At one house, a silver-painted Minerva reclined in a semi-couchant pose with her lion shield on the top of a cement pillar. Other stone walls sported cannonball ornaments of cement at intervals, or baby-bath-size cement tubs for plantings. From the homes came the sound of the sizzle of cooking, the murmur of women, the muffled tones of children.

The dwellings closer to the creek were warrens of entrances and stairways on every level, with balconies and porches and rooftop spaces. Single homes had been made into multiple dwellings by the canny addition of stairways and entrances, and cantilevered space had been achieved where there was none.

On the “better” side of the street, the side farther uphill from the creek, stone walls braced up the hillside and were often topped by shrubs that gave a certain privacy of “estate” to the homes, which were larger than those on the other side of the street, often rising to three stories of flats, but nonetheless immigrant homes. Yet they were distinctly better, if only because by their size they afforded so much room to rent out to boarders, and by their position they could look down on the houses in front of them.