The Tirocchis found Providence a thriving industrial city of just under a quarter of a million inhabitants in 1910. During the previous two decades the population had increased by thirty-three percent and twenty-eight percent respectively, slowing by 1910 and increasing only around six percent for the next two decades. In 1910, Providence was the twentieth largest city in the United States. By 1950, it had slipped to forty-third and was one hundredth in 1980. At the beginning of the century its economy was built around cotton and worsted mills, rubber products, machine-tool fabrication, and jewelry and silver manufacture. A few of the Tirocchis found employment in these industries, but most turned to entrepreneurship. Salvatore's cement-block company and Anna and Laura's dress shop were the first family enterprises, followed by a grocery store, two more cement-product companies, a laundry, two trucking concerns, three gas-station/auto-service firms, two tire-retreading shops, rental properties, a miniature golf course, a dairy, a plumbing business, and a real-estate company. With the exception of the Valcarenghis and Laura and Anna, all adult members of the family's branches were in the contracting, construction, and trucking business at one time or another, and most owned gravel banks, which provided raw materials for some of their various enterprises. They also sold sand, gravel, and loam. Collectively, the family enterprises represent a vertical integration of the construction business.

The 1910 census lists Anna and Laura Tirocchi as wage-earning tailors. Family history indicates that they worked briefly for Rose Carraer-Eastman, later Madam Zarr, a prominent dressmaker patronized by wealthy East Side women. Whatever their earlier employment in Providence, they wasted little time in setting up their own business. In 1911, they opened their dress shop in the Butler Exchange [fig. 62], situated downtown in the center of Providence. They shared their Westminster Street business address with lawyers, doctors, dentists, and other professionals. Wholesalers, insurance agents, music teachers, the Republican State Committee, the Rhode Island Women's Christian Temperance Union, and the Rhode Island Sunday School Association were also among the tenants of that building. In 1913, a firm of patent attorneys and the Crown Gold Mining and Milling Company of Nova Scotia flanked the Tirocchi "gown" suite on the fourth floor. The fifth and sixth floors were given over largely to music teachers.

Anna and Laura joined their brother Frank and his wife as boarders in the newlyweds' home, but the sisters' stay was short. In 1915, Laura married a young American-born physician, Louis J. Cella,(10) who had set up his practice in the Valcarenghis' building on Pocasset Avenue. Anna purchased a large mansion at 514 Broadway in a then fashionable section of the city [see frontispiece]. She and the new couple converted part of the first floor into a doctor's office and the second into a dressmaking shop, living primarily on the third floor, which also housed the workshop for the dressmaking business. As self-designated "gown makers," the Tirocchi sisters sought to distinguish themselves from others who were simply identified as "dressmakers." Moving to the stately Victorian house on Broadway [fig. 63] was a major step in this direction. While in the Butler Exchange, they had been directly across Westminster Street from twenty-five milliners and five dressmakers who had shops located in the historic Arcade [fig. 64]. Other dressmakers and tailors for ladies were scattered about the city center. Through marriage and geography the sisters were moving away from the larger Italian immigrant community and toward middle-class status.