New Film Highlights Artists Who Called Providence Place Home
'Secret Mall Apartment' showcases the eight artists who lived in an underground mall apartment from 2003 to 2007.
Michael Townsend and other artists lived in a secret apartment in Providence Place from 2003 to 2007. A new documentary sheds light on the underground space. Photo courtesy of Michael Townsend.
The shopping mall was born in Providence. So was the idea of living in the mall.
The Westminster Arcade, opened in 1828, is the oldest shopping mall in America; in 2016, it became one of the first places to allow residents to literally live in a mall when the upper floors of the historic three-story building were converted into forty-eight micro-loft apartments, ranging in size from 225 to 800 square feet.
The real Rhode Island pioneers of mall living, however, were the group of local artists who took up residence in Providence Place in 2003, secretly building an apartment in an unused space in the mall and living there on and off until their 750-square-foot pied-à-retail was finally discovered by mall security.
If Providence Place eventually does add a residential component — one of several ideas floated for future redevelopment of the 1.4 million square foot shopping center — Michael Townsend and the (still unnamed) seven other artists who cohabitated in the highly illegal/widely celebrated apartment can always say “been there, done that,” even if the odds are against Townsend ever stepping inside the building again.
Townsend, who first spotted the space destined to become his home when the mall was still under construction, said the motivation for moving into the mall arose from a mix of necessity and artistic vision.
“We began sleeping at the mall because we lost our homes in Eagle Square,” when a community of several hundred artists were evicted from a complex of old mills known as Fort Thunder slated for redevelopment into upscale residences, supermarkets and retail spaces. “There was an oasis of happiness being sold to us by the mall, and we wanted to swim in it,” Townsend says.
Karen Meier, vice president of lead prospecting for economic consulting firm Camoin Associates and author of the 2023 report, “The Growth, Decline, and Rebirth of the American Shopping Mall, called the Providence artists “trailblazers for why malls now have apartments.”
“Before then, nobody would have even thought to live in the mall,” she says.
“Secret Mall Apartment,” a documentary about Townsend’s mall-living experiment, debuts at the South by Southwest Festival March 8. Photo courtesy of Michael Townsend.
The clan of performance artists who moved into Providence Place — managing to sneak in couches, tables and decorative plants, tap into the mall’s electrical supply, and even build a cinder block wall to shield their living space from prying eyes — came to view their residency as symbolic of a vision that sounds ironically familiar to that of the current mall owners.
“We wanted the mall to define us,” says Townsend. “I wanted to get a job at Nordstrom. We would have been the best mall citizens ever: shop at the mall, eat at the mall, deposit checks at the mall, work at the mall. We were lining up our entire lives there.”
That plan came crashing down when security guards followed a visitor to the apartment; the artists were evicted, the furnishings tossed in the trash, and the space sealed off. Townsend was charged with misdemeanor trespassing; the charges were later dropped, but more than 20 years later the ban imposed on him by the mall still stands.
“What still haunts me is they caught us three days before we were putting down the wood floors,” he says. “If we had made it three more months, we would have moved in full time and lived there for a year. We wanted to go into the mall and never leave, and see where it took us — it was a mix of performance art and self exploration.”
These days, many malls are becoming reflections of society, incorporating housing, healthcare facilities, entertainment and community centers in addition to retail stories. That makes perfect sense to Townsend.
“Malls always presented themselves as spaces of aspiration but were always commercially oriented,” he says. “They still are places of exciting possibilities that could be something beneficial to people, but not rooted in the exchange of goods.”
Two decades on, the idea of living at the mall still sparks a mix of nostalgia and longing, and the Providence Place apartment may soon be able to do something that wasn’t possible in 2007: go viral. A new documentary on the project, Secret Mall Apartment, will debut March 8 at the 2024 South by Southwest festival, and Townsend says he dreams of holding the Rhode Island premiere of the film at the mall.
“This is a building I see every day from the window of my studio,” he says. “I miss that place.”
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