They Built a Secret Apartment in a Mall. Now the Mall Is Dying.
In the new documentary “Secret Mall Apartment,” a group of artists recount how they turned a hidden nook in a Providence shopping center into a living space for 4 years.
A secondhand couch, a PlayStation and some plants: all artists need for a secret dwelling inside a shopping mall.
Courtesy of Michael Townsend
The artist Michael Townsend has always been drawn to in-between, overlooked spaces. Drainage tunnels, abandoned drive-ins, hospital waiting rooms, parking lots. When he moved to Providence, Rhode Island, in the 1980s, he settled in an old industrial neighborhood called Eagle Square, where young artists lived cheaply and made things together in cavernous former mill buildings.
So in the late ’90s, as Townsend watched builders construct the gargantuan Providence Place Mall just across the highway from his home, an architectural quirk caught his eye. There was this odd gap between two walls where construction materials were kept. “I was like, wait, that space there is not storage, and it’s not a store, and it’s not the parking garage,” he said in an interview. “It’s a nothing.”