In the bowels of a 1.3 million-square-foot Providence mall, a group of friends made themselves at home. Their private living space—complete with furniture, fortified walls, and a door with a lock and key— went undetected for years. We were like a “barnacle on a whale,” explains artist Michael Townsend of the secret apartment he and several collaborators created in the early 2000s. For the first time, the story of the eight artists who created and lived in the hidden “unit” within the Providence Place mall is being told onscreen with the release of the documentary Secret Mall Apartment, which officially hits theaters this month following its SXSW debut last spring.
The film, directed by Jeremy Workman and produced by Jesse Eisenberg, explores themes of evolving cities, ephemeral art, and the importance of our built environment through interviews with the artists—plus an astounding amount of 20-year-old footage of the apartment’s hush-hush construction process taken on a point-and-shoot camera. At first designed as a rebellion against a gentrifying Providence, the project eventually ballooned into something even larger.
The idea for the secret mall apartment began with the destruction of Fort Thunder, a Providence artist commune in a warehouse that was caught in the crosshairs of the city’s gentrification. It’s a familiar tale: Developers pushed to tear down Fort Thunder and its neighboring historic mill buildings, the community (including Townsend) mounted a resistance, the artists were forced out in 2002, and the building was demolished. What followed? A parking lot and big-box stores, most of which shuttered in the following years.
After Townsend was forced out of Fort Thunder, he and a small group of friends spent a week secretly living inside the Providence Place mall—an entity they considered one of the earliest signs of negative changes to come to the area—as an experimental project. With Fort Thunder destroyed, Townsend wondered if it was possible to make the mall their new home. As Secret Mall Apartment details, they did just that. Because Townsend had seen the mall go up, he was able to pinpoint the perfect under-the-radar “apartment” space in the finished shopping center by thinking back to the building phase. The collective enjoyed spending many of their nights in the dwelling for four years until 2007, when Townsend was caught and charged with trespassing…