Secret Mall Apartment and Other Dives

Okay, this is my new favorite documentary:

https://www.impawards.com/2025/secret_mall_apartment.html

Trailer here:  LINK

Available on Netflix

"In 2003, eight Rhode Islanders created a secret apartment inside a busy mall and lived there for four years, filming everything along the way. Far more than a prank, the secret apartment became a deeply meaningful place for all involved."

Ahem.  They were eight Rhode Island artists, led by Mike Townsend, who had been living and working in cheap slum housing (haven't we all...) all of which was knocked down and replaced by the Providence Place Mall and Marketplace.  To quote Townsend, 

"the only mantra they [the developers] have is if you see a space that’s underdeveloped, you have a God-given responsibility to develop it. And it was basically like having a complete stranger be like, “We’ve been thinking about it, and we think we want to knock your house down and make it a parking lot, if it’s cool with you.”"...

"Oh, our actual home? Oh, yeah, they [BLEEP] leveled that. They came in with bulldozers and cranes and knocked that sucker flat... I’m like, “Oh… Really? Game on.”"

Back when the Mall etc. was being built, Townsend had noticed "an accidental room–a remainder left over by the long division of the mall’s architecture" in the guts of the mall, only accessible by crawling up inside the walls of the mall. 

So... while their homes and studios were gone forever, this room, this underdeveloped space, was there, and no one knew about it but them.  After all, they had a God-given responsibility to develop it, and they did.  (Wait until you see how they moved the furniture in.)  

*****

Squatting is artful expression?  Sounds like a bunch of homeless trespassers

- Comment on a website about SMA.

I disagree.  

For one thing, Townsend's a hell of a good artist:  starting at 23:08 on the video are the sculptures he built in the tunnel under the railroad tracks (another hidden space) that are... haunting, to put it mildly. 

Secondly, while we live in a country that remembers with pride homesteaders and explorers, mountain men and hunters... there's no free space left to do any of that in.  Every scrap of land in this country is owned and controlled by somebody: private citizens, city/county/state/federal governments, Native American tribes, corporations.    

BTW, most farms in America are "family farms" - but as you can see, the top 4%(which earn $1 million+ and are structured like corporations) account for most of the production.  

And if you're homeless - OMG.  There's no place for the homeless to go, which gets hugely ironic when a city/corporate deal knocks down 32 acres of urban shops and housing to build a mall, without making any arrangements for relocating the people who used to live there. Oops! You're out! Good luck finding a new place to live! And how dare you hang around here and muck up our new upscale image?  

Similar stuff's happening here, too. The Sioux Falls City Council decided to build a Convention Center downtown, and in order to do that demolished the Sioux Falls Department of Social Services (DSS) building, moving it to a new, consolidated "One Stop" building way out on the perimeter, hard to get to for people who don't own a car and/or are disabled. 

Now the idea was that a Convention Center will bring in lots of revenue, decrease crime, and get rid of the pesky homeless who live on the river in the summer.  I find this hilarious, because conventions generally come with an increase of crime, especially prostitution, theft, assaults, DUIs, etc. After all, one of the major reasons people go to conventions is to get away from their home territory and let their hair down, not to mention their pants. Why do you think Grindr breaks down every time a convention hits a town? Look it up.  

And the idea that you can go out into the wilderness and live off the land - a favorite fantasy, BTW, of inmates and I don't blame them a bit - Well, you can't.  What wilderness? You can't even pull over to the side of the road in your car and crash out anymore, which is what my parents did when we used to travel cross country in the 1960s. Some law enforcement personnel is going to stop and ask you what you're doing and how intoxicated you are.  There is no more homesteading.  And even in the Alaskan wilderness, if you go out and build a cabin miles from anyone anywhere...  well, if the government finds it, they'll take it down.

Now let's talk rent: A 2 bedroom apartment in Providence, Rhode Island ran around $570+ in 1994, but then again, minimum wage was $4.25/hr = $170 a week = $680 a month.  That leaves $110 for food, clothing, utilities, etc.  Not much to actually live on, was it?  

Same when I was sharing a 4 bedroom house with a bunch of artists in Atlanta back in 1973 - rent ran around $400 a month, while minimum wage was $1.60/hr = $64 a week = $256 a month.  You damn well better share to split the rent.  

BTW, we turned the place into a 6 bedroom simply by making every room except the bathroom, kitchen, and living room a bedroom.  Mine was the back porch, which had wrap-around windows and a gas space heater I lit with a match. I loved it - my sanctuary, where I wrote like a maniac, read like an opium addict, dreamed... oh, how I dreamed...  And with six of us (not to mention sleepovers), there was always someone available for talking, dreaming, drinking, laughing...   

So I'm all in favor of survival.  No one was using that room that was so well hidden that the mall administration and security guards themselves didn't know it was there. No harm, no foul in my book. Because if you're not born rich, you've got to be creative to stay alive in this world. 

Especially if you're becoming an artist. It takes a lot of work, obsession, talking, arguing, partying, debating, cooperating, and more work to get from the dream to the reality.  Every city has had and still has its neighborhood.  Some are more famous than others:  Left Bank!  Montmartre!  Greenwich Village!  Chelsea!  Florence!  Soho!  Tribeca!  Little Five Points!  And so many more.  

There's a reason Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème of starving artists and their muses has been translated into dozens of languages, made into movies, operas, musicals, etc. Because right now, there are a group of artists in your city that are living in a run-down section of town, working crap jobs and staying up all night to do the work to become their dream... Whether in a slum or a house or a Secret Mall Apartment.

I hope you enjoy it. I sure did. Both the documentary, and in real life.