Secret Mall Apartment is Zany and Completely Intriguing

Like most New Yorkers with a lack of closet space, I had a storage unit in Manhattan.  However, when my living situation became sketchy, I quickly contemplated hatching a plan with one of girlfriends to set up a way to dwell in our unit.  Needless to say, fear of rats and the possibility of spending time behind bars snapped us both into reality.  But, you want to hear something fascinating?

In 2003, eight Rhode Island artists created a secret apartment inside the busy Providence Place Mall and lived there for four years, filming everything. Sneaking in furniture up steep narrow ladders, tapping into the mall’s electricity, and even constructed a wall, smuggling in more than two tons of cinderblock.

Far more than just a wild prank, the secret apartment became a deeply meaningful place for its inhabitants. It was a personal expression of defiance against local gentrification, a boundary-pushing work of public/private art, a clubhouse in which large-scale charitable art projects were planned, and, finally, a 750 square-foot “F you” to The Man.

For the first time, featuring never-before-seen footage of the space and revealing the identities of all the participants , Secret Mall Apartment is more than just a zany true story. Director Jeremy Workman delivers a poignant exploration of artists who discovered their purpose within the most commercial and improbable places.

Having just recently screened Skywalkers: A Love Story at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus climb the world’s last super skyscraper, blending daring acrobatics with a tumultuous love story, I knew this doc would be right up my alley.

Gobsmacked through most of the footage, my mind swirled trying to figure out how Michael Townsend became the pied piper of this artistic caper while virtually never getting caught until he did.  Self admittedly, the group realized that they were not busted sooner simply due to the cloak of ‘white privilege’ afforded to them.  If any of these artists were any other ethnicity, they would have been behind bars faster than one’s eyes can blink.  Yet, what these eight human were able to accomplish is simply fascinating while straddling the lines of activist art and the reality of the world around them.

Aside from their mall trespassing, these artists traveled around the country creating duct tape art which is simply mesmerizing, while soothing souls and minds from children to adults alike during some of their most tumultuous moments in life and neighborhoods.  Watching Michael struggle between his artistic visions and maintaining the visions for his married life was tough to watch as sometimes being an artistic genius comes at a cost. A cost that Michael paid for in more ways than one.

In addition to watching his marriage dissolve, he was arrested, served time for trespassing in the Providence Place Mall and banned from the property, which is now ironically no longer a mall – but a high rise apartment building.  The irony of all of it is just too good to be true. Secret Mall Apartment is a reminder to remember as we all continue to live in the shadows of these larger economic systems, corporations come and remake our neighborhoods forcing citizens to adjust to whims making it harder and harder to stand up and assert our identity in a world constantly changing and evolving on a dime.