Domenico builds a duplex on Hollyhock Avenue

Domenico’s construction of a duplex on Hollyhock Avenue turns a family crisis into a building project: he means to create a home, secure income, and restore the Tempesta name, all through a plan that depends on his brother Pasquale. The house takes shape through years of labor and calculation, but Domenico’s vision of it reaches beyond its walls—to a particular kind of family life, ordered according to his own demands.

From family embarrassment to a building plan

On 13 February 1914, Domenico purchased a quarter-acre lot on the hilly west end of Hollyhock Avenue for $340. He was thirty-six. His decision followed a winter in which he brooded over the town’s ridicule of the Tempesta name, which he associated with Pasquale and the monkey that had, in his view, distracted his brother. Domenico felt once again responsible for cleaning up a brother’s mess. Rather than act on his first impulse to harm the animal, he drew on what he believed he had learned from his past conflict with Vincenzo: forcing his will on a stubborn brother would not work. He would instead make a patient, practical plan, keeping the prospect of Rosemark’s property in mind.

The duplex answered both economic and familial needs. Domenico reasoned that two brothers working steadily could build a home twice as quickly as one, and that a two-apartment house would provide its owner with shelter as well as rental income. He also assumed that Pasquale shared his desire to have sons and pass on the Tempesta name, despite the monkey’s influence. The building therefore depended on a larger arrangement: two apartments, in Domenico’s conception, called for two families.

Designing the house and its households

Domenico’s plan extended from the lot to the selection of wives. He wrote to cousins in Brooklyn asking about eligible Italian women, preferably Sicilian, and dismissed the idea of city-born wives as carriers of what he called fancy northern ideas. His criteria were stringent: he expected the women to be virgins, attractive, skilled at cooking and housekeeping, dignified, devout, and humble. He also insisted that their families provide dowries sufficient to furnish both apartments. He had ruled out eligible young women in Three Rivers because he suspected Vincenzo had compromised them. The house thus embodies not simply a wish for family continuity but Domenico’s effort to regulate the marriages and domestic lives that would fill it.

Its design made a related statement about belonging. Domenico imagined a house that would be American at the front and Sicilian at the back, with two seven-room apartments on two floors and indoor plumbing. He called for nothing less than a palace for the first Sicilian property owner in Three Rivers, Connecticut. Outside, cement steps would lead, in his imagination, to Sicily; he planned honeysuckle, peach trees, a small grape arbor, a tomato garden, herbs in stone urns, and a chicken coop. The projected home joined modern conveniences and property ownership to a carefully composed landscape of remembered or imagined Sicilian domestic life.

Building by hand and by observation

The work began in early spring 1914, after the ground thawed. By Easter, Domenico and Pasquale had cleared and stumped the lot and were digging the foundation one shovelful at a time. The house was to be made of vitrified brick. Domenico labored on it by day, stopping only in the late afternoon to eat and sleep. Pasquale spent his working hours roofing houses for Werman until four, then joined the construction until dark; the monkey remained close by, chattering or perched on his shoulder. The brothers ate cold suppers together in the boardinghouse kitchen, after which Pasquale slept in the cellar and Domenico walked to the mill for work.

Sundays gave the labor a different meaning. The brothers worked side by side on the house, and Domenico remembered these as the best days: two young men bringing a dream to life board by board and brick by brick. The shared work briefly made the project more than Domenico’s private scheme. Its progress depended on Pasquale’s effort, even though the plan for Pasquale’s marriage was one Domenico intended to negotiate without his knowledge.

When winter froze the ground and halted construction, Domenico continued preparing for the next stage. He went with Pasquale to taverns where builders gathered, not to spend money on drink but to question workers and learn from their experience. He persuaded installers and electricians to explain their successes and mistakes and draw on napkins. The conversations cost him nothing, and he treated them as another resource to be carefully acquired. After nights dyeing wool at the mill, he sometimes took the long route home, past the half-built house as the early sun fell on its brick, wood, and stone.

The house takes shape and becomes a public emblem

In early spring 1915, the brothers resumed work on the second story. They laid brick tiers, moved granite windowsills and Sicilian marble stoops into place, fitted window and door frames and joists, built the chimney, and partitioned the rooms. High on the front wall, Domenico set bricks diagonally to form two three-foot-high Ts, visible to the town. He intended the letters to honor his father and raise the Tempesta name. By fall, the brick, stone, and wooden skeleton was complete; Domenico expected the roof to be on before winter.

The nearly finished house drew visits from other Italians in Three Rivers, who congratulated Domenico on his palace. Visitors brought cakes, cheeses, and jugs of homemade wine for good luck. Domenico read their generosity with suspicion, deciding that everyone wanted the favor of a successful man. That judgment sits beside the concrete recognition the building had earned: his long labor had made the project visible, and the house had become a public sign of ambition and status.

Significance within Domenico’s account

The duplex concentrates several ambitions in one structure. It is an investment, a home for two households, a means of carrying on the Tempesta name, and a display of Italian-American property ownership. Its American front and Sicilian rear give physical form to Domenico’s effort to combine life in Three Rivers with an idealized domestic world. At the same time, his specifications for wives and dowries expose the coercive assumptions beneath that ideal: the house’s promised family future is designed in advance by a man who treats women’s choices and his brother’s consent as matters he can manage.

The construction also offers a rare image of brotherly cooperation in Domenico’s narrative. Pasquale’s labor is indispensable, and their Sundays together are recalled with warmth, even as the monkey’s presence and Domenico’s secret marriage plans keep the partnership uneasy. The building rises through shared effort, but its governing design remains Domenico’s. By putting the Tempesta initial high on the façade, he makes the private project legible as a bid for family honor in the town that had laughed at the name.