The Providence Place Mall, in downtown Providence, RI, is the largest indoor carpeted mall in the United States. This distinction is beloved among Rhode Islanders, and conversations about it usually follow familiar beats (is there a larger outdoor carpeted mall?) until somebody inevitably mentions the people who, in 2003, built a clandestine apartment inside the mall and lived inside it undetected. For four years!
Jeremy Workman’s new documentary Secret Mall Apartment (2024) dusts off a story that threatened to exist forever as local urban legend, like David Byrne’s maybe-apocryphal stint serving wieners at Providence’s iconic hot dog stand. It turns out the mall-dwellers—a group of eight young artists, several of whom attended RISD three decades after Byrne dropped out—rigorously documented their attempt to live out the classic childhood fantasy of going to the mall and never leaving. Led by the artists Michael Townsend and Adriana Valdez Young, the group filmed hours of shaky cinema vérité–style footage on a point-and-shoot video camera (hidden, 2003-ishly, inside a tin of Altoids). Workman has assembled this lo-fi material into a lively reverse-heist narrative, like Inside Man (2006) without any hostages.
First we watch the group find, deep within the mall’s ugly sprawl, a forgotten and architecturally pointless “nowhere space” accessible via some emergency stairwells and, as one shot suggests, a mysterious portal above a toilet. Pretty quickly, they convert this liminal corner into an improbably cozy hang zone, carting in a thrifted sofa, video game console, rug, waffle maker, and so on. The film dwells within this appealing mise-en-scène, which gestures toward a tradition of teen-movie basements: warmly lit, heavy on the plaid, a goofy autonomous zone right under the nose of the man. By the time the crew is sleeping there regularly and trucking in cinderblocks to build an additional DIY-wall, it’s evident that we’re watching a document of a long-ago security culture, when public space was unmonitored enough that you could squat someplace for multiple years before the narcs noticed. (The group didn’t film the moment when they finally got caught, but the documentary re-creates the apartment, The Rehearsal–style, and has the artists—now nearing middle age—reenact its discovery by a pair of blundering security guards.)
In interviews also filmed in the present, the mall-dwellers offer a belated artist statement, persuasively describing the apartment project as a work of political performance art in a Situationist vein. All those yards of indoor carpeting had been built in 1999, as part of a mostly ill-conceived urban renewal scheme—an era in which Providence also invited developers to tear down a cluster of former mills that had housed many legendary squats, art spaces, and music venues. Displaced from one particularly fabled art space, Townsend and his comrades undertook their own tongue-in-cheek careers as “microdevelopers.”
The film presents the mall as hopelessly square, an avatar of gentrification, corporate capture, all the forces that killed punk forever. But some of its best and fondest scenes of Bush-era public life happen when Townsend and his comrades emerge from their secret dwelling and enter the flow of retail happening just outside. We watch them do standard mallrat stuff—loitering in the food court, trying on clothes, catching movies (School of Rock and Kill Bill) and eating popcorn for dinner—like the survivors in Dawn of the Dead (1978) who commandeer department stores. It’s striking how much George Romero’s live-in-the-mall masterpiece looms over Secret Mall Apartment, especially from the vantage of the present, when many malls, Providence Place among them, have themselves become private equity–fed zombies. As in Dawn of the Dead, the film begins with a TV news broadcast—a wide-eyed anchor informs us that the group has been discovered—and its titular space eerily resembles the decked-out shelter (couch, TV, fussy dining table) that Romero’s characters assemble inside their mall’s creepy mezzanine. Like them, Townsend and his “roommates” construct something homey from inside the punishing excess of mass retail. “Where are you guys from?” a Pottery Barn employee asks the group at one point. Someone’s answer, delivered with punk nonchalance: “Here.”
Secret Mall Apartment runs March 26-April 3 at IFC. Director Jeremy Workman will be in attendance alongside the film’s subjects and executive producer Jesse Eisenberg for a series of Q&As between tomorrow and March 30.
