"Secret Mall Apartment," a Protest for Place

In 2003, a group of Rhode Island artists created a secret living space within a busy shopping mall and lived there off and on, undetected, for about four years. 

Why? 

The new documentary Secret Mall Apartment, now in select theaters nationwide, tells the story of eight Providence-based artists who, although they periodically hint at their left-leaning politics, admirably dedicate their time and skills to projects paying tribute to the first-responder firemen who perished on 9/11, the victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and sick children in hospitals. It’s touching. You root for them. 

Oh, and they live in their local mall. 

Directed by Jeremy Workman and produced by actor Jesse Eisenberg, the documentary features grainy 2000s cell-phone camera footage of the cast of characters—all artists but also intimate friends—as well as modern-day interviews about their time living in the mall. 

The ringleader is Michael Townsend, who is fifty-four now and hatched the mall apartment project in his early thirties. When the Providence Place Mall was under construction, one of Townsend’s friends noticed that there was an odd space that didn’t seem to have a dedicated purpose. Townsend took the lead on furnishing the space with goods from the Salvation Army and other thrift stores.   

Townsend said in an interview, “It was windowless, lifeless concrete, very industrial, not designed to be comfortable in any way—that said, myself and my comrades are all repeat offenders of moving into mill spaces that are big and industrial and making them into our homes—that’s our whole bag.” 

The original plan was to stay a week. 

“It trains you to be in a mindset that you have a sort of role as steward of spaces that you will temporarily make something different and uniquely beautiful, and just as easily remove it,” he added.  

The artists’ squatting was a statement. They hated the mall. By “living” there, without permission or anyone even noticing (the logistics of their apartment living are some of the most interesting parts of the movie) the artists attempt to domesticate and humanize this soulless shrine to consumerism foisted on them by city planners. 

These Gen X and Millennial artists had only known late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century post-industrial Providence, and they made home out of the little they had to work with. They had repurposed abandoned textile mill buildings into apartments, art galleries, and warehouse party spots in an area known as Fort Thunder. Developers eventually demolished Fort Thunder, kicking the artists out. Not long after, developers began construction on the Providence Place Mall, which, seemingly by design, separated the working class areas of Providence from the wealthier areas. For many locals, it was a lot of development all at once, the mall in particular being a radical transformation for their city. 

Deciding to squat in the mall they hated was a unique form of defiance against lifeless urban sprawl, but the sentiment was not exactly new. From the Southern Agrarians of the 1930s to Richard Weaver and beyond, there is a long history of conservative resistance to modernity, particularly the industrial revolution.  

Watching the film, my mind first went to Russell Kirk and Wendell Berry and their low opinion of bulldozers, but even more so to the great localist conservative Bill Kauffman. Of his own often-mentioned and beloved hometown of Batavia, New York, Kauffman wrote in 2017, “Our city fathers rushed headlong into this mad program whereby the federal government paid Batavia to knock down its past: the mansions of the founders, sandstone churches, the brick shops of Main Street—the whole damned—or, rather, blessed—thing.”
 

“Batavia,” he continued, “tore out its five-block heart and filled the cavity with a ghastly mall, a colossal failure built in the aptly named Brutalist style. We are used today in urban-planning texts as a case study in disaster.” 

Lamenting the mall and the demolition of old Batavia, Kauffman added, “In some ways we were a typical small American city but in other ways we were ‘Batavia’—our own place. We did not yet bow down before the new American royalty: Burger King and Dairy Queen.” 

The tenants of Secret Mall Apartment frequented the mall food court of Burger Kings, Dairy Queens, or whatever interchangeable fast-food offerings were available. They used the public bathrooms. They built a cinder block wall to further conceal their hiding place, with each occupant having a key to the door, where they could enter at any time to play video games or spend the night. 

It was meant as an unusual form of protest, only known to them. The same generic mall imposed on Providence, impervious to the organic customs and character of the place, was also detached enough from the human beings who lived there that the building’s authorities didn’t detect a gaggle of them inhabiting the property for four years. 

How they are eventually discovered is almost as random as how they ended up in the unused mall space. I won’t spoil it here because it is worth seeing on the big screen—Michael Townsend is banned from the Providence Place Mall to this day, something he finds hilarious. 

Secret Mall Apartment is an entertaining documentary about an unusual project whose participants were called to action by their love of place and their sense that we must resist the constant upheavals of modern life.