Have you ever fantasized about living in a shopping mall? Everything you need is right there: all kinds of goods, clothing, movie theater, food court. In my post-apocalyptic fantasies, I live in an enclosed mall or an airport. This has been done in post-apoc fiction and movies. Dawn of the Dead, for example (and Station Eleven fulfilled my airport fantasy). I have also fantasized about living in a library or museum (see The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler or Wonderstruck). Or Disneyland (see “Deathmatch in Disneyland” by Vance Aandahl).

Secret Mall Apartment is a documentary about a group of artists who lived this dream. The story begins in the late 90s. Providence, Rhode Island was launching an urban renewal project and knocking down old factories and mills from the industrial past to build shiny new properties. The first new construction project was a big mall called Providence Place, adjacent to the train tracks. On the other side of those tracks was an artist community squatting in old mill buildings.

Michael Townsend is an artist. He taught at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and has done a lot of guerilla art projects, including an unauthorized 9/11 tribute with tape art around NYC. Michael lived in one of those old mills on the wrong side of the tracks until he was evicted when the city tore it down to build condos.

Michael watched Providence Place go up. He noticed a void in the construction and wondered what was in that spot in the finished mall. He found the void area off the maze of corridors in the employees-only part of the mall. He and some of his art school students decided to turn that space into a secret apartment. They worked on it for years, sneaking in at night past the security guard station. They smuggled in furniture, a tv set, a Playstation. They ran an extension cord from an electrical outlet in the mall into their secret space. They realized that the space was vulnerable if a curious mall employee went wandering so they smuggled in cinderblocks to build a wall. They got caught once, unloading cinderblocks from their car, but Mike used his charm and white privilege to talk their way out of trouble.

For four years Mike and seven others lived in that space. They bought a cheap video camera to document the experience but after a while they stopped recording. It felt too much like being characters in a sitcom. They had two rules: tell no outsiders what they were doing and stay away during the daytime.

It was inevitable they would get caught one day. But four years is a pretty long run. They only caught Michael, who is now under a lifetime ban at the mall. The identities of the others were unknown until they made this documentary.

Providence Place has fallen on hard times since, like many a mega mall around the country. They went into receivership in late 2024. Ironically, they are now considering converting some of the space into apartments.

Secret Mall Apartment is a weirdly uplifting tale about reclaiming a piece of a gentrified city from the developers who tore down the old city and priced the residents out of existence. Now playing on Netflix.

Update: There’s a sort of happy ending. The mall unbanned Michael when they played the film at the mall theater. The new owners are less hostile to Michael’s trespassing and there was so much local interest in the story that they held the film at the theater for a year.