It is a crazy story. In 2003, a group of young, displaced artists in Providence, Rhode Island, decided to spend a whole week at the giant new mall that had taken over their neighborhood and wound up staying for years. The initial idea was both a lark and the kind of vaguely thought-through provocation one comes up with in the restless flush of youth: “Oh, we should live at the mall.” It came in response to a radio ad in which a mom (or, well, “a mom”) said she wished she could live at the Providence Place shopping center. So, these impulsive artists took it upon themselves to try it out. Looking for hidden spots to crash for the night, they chanced upon a forgotten, 750-square-foot “nowhere space” in one of the upper floors, an unclaimed anomaly in the architecture hidden behind dark, narrow, dusty passageways. They set up camp, and ever-so-slowly turned it into an ersatz condo, with a couch, a TV, lights, tables, cabinets, and more. They smuggled in a mountain of cinder blocks and construction equipment and put in a wall and a door, with its own keys; they were a week away from putting in plumbing and a wooden floor when they were finally discovered in 2007. Jeremy Workman’s deliriously entertaining and moving documentary Secret Mall Apartment lets the artists themselves tell us the story. Remarkably, most of them have not been identified until now.
Built in 1999, the 1.5-million-square-foot Providence Place was an architectural Goliath that took over a large, unclaimed area near one of the city’s working-class neighborhoods. (As one interviewee informs us, the building didn’t really have any entrances on the side facing the poorer part of town; this shopping center filled with expensive stores was not meant for the people who actually lived in the area.) Following the mall’s construction, politicians and developers set their sights on gentrifying the nearby lower-income neighborhood of Olneyville, home to an artists’ colony known as Fort Thunder, an abandoned warehouse where for years Providence’s impoverished creative class found room to live and work in an elaborate, art- and music-filled community. All of these areas were remnants of the city’s industrial-era glory years as a mill town, as well as symbols of its post-war decline, when businesses fled and Providence was split by highways that turned it into a glorified rest stop for people traveling to bigger cities and better suburbs.
Among the people who lived in this area was Michael Townsend, who became the de facto ringleader for the artists who created the secret mall apartment. For him and his compatriots (which included Adriana Valdez-Young, his then wife), the notion of carving out a domestic abode inside one of Providence Place’s own underutilized spaces was a sly way of getting back at the forces that had displaced them. There was also a certain conceptual poetry in the idea of buying all those tony home goods being sold at the mall in order to create a tony (and very much illegal) home in the mall.
Workman’s film makes it clear that these people weren’t a bunch of layabouts. Townsend was an artist who created startling public installations. Perhaps more importantly, he was (and remains) a master of “tape art” — temporary but beautiful murals made with painter’s tape, which he taught weekly at a local children’s hospital and which he had also done to support the crews working at the site of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and, later, to commemorate the anniversary of September 11. (I do remember seeing some of Townsend’s work at the time. He and his group of artists created life-size tape silhouettes of 9/11 victims at various locations throughout lower Manhattan; if you connected all these spots together on a map, it would reveal three giant hearts overlaid across the lower half of the island.)
These are the intriguing ideas at work in Secret Mall Apartment, but the film works as a movie thanks to the sly way it’s been put together. The artists themselves shot some footage at the time using a Pentax Optio S4i camera, which could fit into an Altoids can and produced a fuzzy image with lousy sound. They even captured scenes of themselves lugging couches and other objects and evading security as well as one time when they got discovered, mid-cinder-block-smuggle. Workman cuts this footage together into a suspenseful through-line, which he then intercuts with contemporary interviews. He films his subjects today in vibrant fashion, often in colorful, domestic spaces — a couple of interviewees even have their pets with them — reinforcing the idea of home as an extension of one’s humanity, an assertion of the self in the world. The director also doubles back and tells Townsend’s story, connecting the pointed impermanence of the artist’s work with the high-wire nature of the secret mall apartment.
Watching Secret Mall Apartment, I was reminded at times of James Marsh’s Man on Wire (2008), about Philippe Petit’s 1974 daredevil tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Center. Many have said that Petit’s walk humanized the Twin Towers, taking what was seen at the time as a cold, usurping architectural monstrosity and turning it into a quaint, approachable part of New York’s landscape. The secret mall apartment wasn’t public until it was finally revealed, of course, but there’s an echo of Petit’s act in the idea of these young artists carving out a home for themselves inside the unfeeling concrete beast that helped take away their community. It also speaks to the life and death of cities and suburbs, and our boom-and-bust dreams of affluence. Like many malls across the United States — including the now-defunct malls where I spent much of my own youth — Providence Place has seen better days, as the destruction of brick-and-mortar commerce by the Amazons of the world continues apace. Townsend had been banned for life from the mall, but he’s finally being allowed back in — because Secret Mall Apartment is premiering this weekend on multiple screens at the Showcase Providence Place Cinemas, complete with Q&As. Something tells me both the mall and its movie theaters could use the business.
