Original subtitles

Our other top local story on Eyewitness News at Noon.

This is an incredible tale.

Artists set up an apartment inside Providence Place Mall, going undetected for years.

We were listening to the radio and this ad came on for the Providence Place Mall.

It was this woman, she was a mom, and she was talking about how great her

life was about to become because it was going to be so convenient for her to get

everything that she needed for her kids, for herself, if only she could live there.

I just had this idea, oh, we should live in the mall.

Live at the mall, like, it seemed like a very absurd fantasy and a great way to

plow through all of the negativity that had been built up for years in the loss of

our homes and the homes of, like, hundreds of people.

And so Adriana and Andrew and Jay and myself decided

that we would go live there for at least one week.

It was more of a game of survival.

Who was going to get kicked out from security and who was going to last the longest?

I think we were making bets about it.

I definitely thought that I was going to live there the longest.

I think my mind, I was like, oh, we need to document.

And I'm like, oh, we need a sketchbook.

And Mike's instinct on the document was like, all right, we all need to have a

point and shoot camera and be able to do video.

We had a little camera called a Pentax Optio S4i.

It is incredibly low res and the audio is terrible.

It's not designed for video.

Interestingly, it fit inside an Altoids can.

In my hand, that camera disappears, which meant that

I could walk through the mall with my arm like this.

That sounds silly, but I would forget it was there.

It was a fair bit of the food court.

It was trying on clothes.

You know, funny kind of teenage mall hang existence.

We ate all the leftover food at the food court.

We saw like almost every movie at the movie theater, which was awesome.

But as the sun set, we started to internalize the

dilemma we put ourselves in, which is we have no plan.

Where are we going to sleep?

Jay and Andrew found a four foot by four foot column in the parking garage that had

an opening that they could sneak up inside of.

I was in a really small space, unable to stretch out.

I believe I slept in my jacket with my knees kind of curled up to my chest.

I've been camping in some way, shape or form since I was

a small kid and I've had a lot of miserable nights out.

And this is in the pantheon of worst.

The place that Adriana and I find is based on my memory of the mall's construction.

When the mall was being built, I saw a space that

I could not figure out what it would be used for.

It was a nowhere space and I saw them store construction materials on it.

And I just sort of made a mental note about it.

I proposed that perhaps the nowhere space, as

it were, would give us shelter for the night.

And we went looking for that anomaly in the architecture and

we snuck ourselves in there and we took out our flashlights.

And we kept poking around and it struck me that the nowhere space, as it were,

must be up here somewhere.

And we were able to push ourselves up I-beams.

And there it was.

And it was safe and secure.

We're completely off the radar.

We weren't even entirely sure where we were in the mall.

But there was... the debris of construction was still there.

You know, four years later after the mall had opened, it was dirty.

It was truly abandoned.

And we were like, oh, this is great!

Mike had been like, come see the space I found.

And so, like, we all went down and into the bowels

and saw the, like, cavern that he had found.

Looking around at all the clues, it's like, no

one's been in here since they built the mall.

It started the conversation immediately about, like, wait, this is a lot of space.

Maybe we have a responsibility to do something with it.

It was sort of agreed pretty quickly that the couch was the most important thing.

We're going to the mall, we're going to eat.

We'll have receipts from eating.

This proves nothing...

Right, we could say we're in the process of moving...

we wanted to get something to eat. We went to the mall.

The reason for the plan is, if we do corner the mall, we're gonna eat.

get caught to keep our story straight, that's all.

So, we just need to move it to this one door, which sets off the alarm.

And there is a security camera, but it's not pointed in our direction,

which is excellent.

And um, yeah, we're just sort of waiting out the security office since we can see it

[ Door alarm buzzing ]

Any time I went to a hearing at City Hall for a new real estate development,

this term of underutilized space kept coming up.

It was almost like it was a moral obligation on the part

of the developers to tap into this underutilized space.

It was almost like a crime.

We must extend our progress, and it must fill in every gap and crevice in the city

until there's a seamless development.

And so this was, like, a funny way of, like, itching back at that, of,

like, well, we found some space.

We need to develop this underutilized space.

And I remember having this funny, jokey conversation about being micro-developers.

You know, that seemed really funny to us, that we would become developers,

but just for 750 square feet.

We put a bunch of ideas into the table, some of them were absolutely ridiculous.

You know, even about opening up our own store for, like, how would anybody visit it?

And we're like, we can just build a condominium, like, right here.

And, like, the couch is the thing that sort of made it a home immediately.

Providence had one time been one of the wealthiest cities in the United States.

And after World War II, an inexorable decline began to happen.

Providence seemed little more than a parking

lot by day and an abandoned city by night.

Serious decline soon created an uninviting, neglected environment.

It wasn't until in the mid-1980s, late 1980s, that the idea of a mall became

the centerpiece of the whole Providence Renaissance.

You wanted retail to come back.

You wanted performing and visual arts.

You wanted all the things that Providence had been known for.

All of those things that would make Providence a destination,

and not just a drive-through to another major city.

The Providence Place Mall was considered to be a major

new engine to help the revitalization effort take place.

The city had began to lose its retailing sales to the surrounding suburban areas.

But the mall did not happen overnight.

It took years and multiple administrations in order for this to occur.

It was a major building.

While the mall was being built, I really

started to internalize its impact on the city.

Because all of a sudden, I literally couldn't see the city anymore.

Look at this giant...

Look at this thing.

It's totally overpowering.

Looks like something out of a science fiction movie.

You've got the state house.

You can't even see it anymore.

They've practically buried it.

I mean, it was no small task to move the rivers and to move the railroad tracks.

But I think it began to show that things were happening.

I remember the preview event, and everybody coming from all parts of New England.

It wasn't even just Rhode Island.

This is a large mall.

Am I correct?

Oh, definitely.

You know, three and a half million square feet.

You don't get this type of mall in any city and everything.

It's very unique.

It makes this a destination city.

So having this big mall that represented a big

investment, it was kind of like a new face.

For Providence, I think that was more probably

something that was aligned with what politicians wanted.

But not necessarily for the communities, especially the adjacent communities.

We all hated the mall when it went up, right?

Nobody wanted that to happen.

It was infuriating.

Instead of putting the money into downtown in general and supporting the businesses

that were already here, they built that monstrosity.

We hated it.

And then as they started to sort of shore up the side facing our neighborhood,

I realized like, wait, there's no entrances for us.

This whole thing faces the east side.

It wasn't designed to be used by the people from this neighborhood.

In a way, it's like drawing a boundary in between the premium Providence and then

just like, you know, the unattractive, kind of historically excluded Providence.

The stores, some stores, it's like the prices are like kind of outrageous.

But for some people, I guess they can afford it.

Me, personally.

This mall will attract a better clientele of people.

It's gonna basically cater to the people that have a little more money.

The poor people in Providence can't afford to go to these stores.

No.

I've been there. I know. I can't go to these stores.

By the time the mall opened, there was a sense that more changes were coming our way.

And there was a sense of impending doom.

Even before the Providence Place Mall was complete,

developers were getting ready to build Providence Marketplace.

Even while scaffolding still scales the Providence Place Mall, another huge

project is in the works.

The Providence Place Mall opened August of 1999.

And shortly after, a developer came to the mills spaces that we were living in and

put a proposal out that perhaps the best way to serve this neighborhood was to

knock down every single mill in a 13-acre area and

replace it with a strip mall and a supermarket.

So one of those buildings they wanted to knock down was Fort Thunder.

So behind the mall, we see the skeleton of the Industrial Revolution.

It is mill building after mill building.

And in the middle of all this mill building mess is called Eagle Square.

And in the heart of Eagle Square was a place called Fort Thunder.

And I was very fortunate to live there for a couple years.

Well, Fort Thunder was a mill space.

It lasted, I think, from 95 to like 2001.

It started out with four of us renting this space.

My band, Lightning Bolt, needed a place of practice.

And we wanted to have shows.

The history of that area, the history of Olneyville, is a

really specific history that you'll see throughout New England.

There were these factories.

People would live in the neighborhoods.

And then when the manufacturing sector was destroyed in the United States,

it destroyed these neighborhoods.

So if you were going to Fort Thunder for the first time, it was scary.

It was sort of like this secret playhouse for a while.

They just wanted to have fun.

They wanted to create.

They wanted to have their own world there.

You know, museums were like crypts, graveyards for art.

And our house was like a living art creature that we lived within.

I think it was like emboldening in a way to have this kind of like wild,

untamed space.

Just like living this really loud, literally like very loud.

So living in Fort Thunder is that sense of no routine, but a great sense of purpose.

And then, you know, within the year of that super heyday, a developer came in.

People started getting kicked out and the city just started looking at that area.

These developers saw a great opportunity for themselves because they knew that they

could buy these buildings and knock them down.

Come back July 2nd.

The joint better be empty.

Make sure you're out of here and that the joint's empty.

I'm not fucking around.

The developer was just looking at it as if it was any

old parcel that could become a suburban strip mall.

I mean, it's just an algorithm.

And they're like, oh, there's room for a supermarket

here because the property value is so cheap.

All we have to do is just knock down all these buildings.

There was no outreach to the community to talk about like

rent control and how under-resourced the community was.

It's okay.

Like change happens.

Like there's nothing inherently wrong or evil about it.

But there was no effort to bring people along.

And I think that in a way, Fort Thunder was like the first strike.

And I think the real estate developers were just

starting to understand that there was so much to exploit.

We'll take a motion to close the hearing,

and allow everyone to speak that's signed up to speak.

Michael Townsend?

Over the course of the chaos in the last year and a half

everybody who lived in the area has been slowly pushed out.

And now, I just want to give a heads up

to the concept of responsibility for these buildings

as far as who have responsibility for it.

When the Eagle Square fiasco was unfolding, the mall becomes this sort of

cultural enemy.

It becomes a sort of ogre in the cave that the townsfolk are afraid of.

They're not sure how big it is, but they just know it's nasty.

And so that tension just boils over as soon as an actual

person comes in and says, I'm going to knock down your home.

People being evicted, people losing their spaces, people getting kicked out,

people getting priced out.

It's just sort of something kind of happening.

The mall comes, totally remakes your neighborhood.

You adjust.

It doesn't adjust to you.

You adjust to it.

And it was impossible to not see the apartment project through that lens.

Yeah, just go quickly.

It won't set up at once.

Yeah, we can go straight from the moon to our house.

Brilliant.

By this stage, the group of people invited

into the space had grown from four to eight.

And occasionally, a few of us would sleep there.

But for the most part, it was a fantastic place to just meet and hang out.

The food court was closed, so please, people, enjoy what you can.

The mall project, I think, it emerged fairly organically.

The main person who really started the project and who had the initial idea was Mike.

It wasn't as though Mike sat down and was like, I got to assemble a super group of

people in order to, like, create this artist

collective that will be a public-facing thing.

As with other projects that Mike has done, he wanted

to involve the people who were in his life in it.

He wanted to make it a group project.

Michael was a thread that connected everybody.

A lot of folks he met through his time teaching, and so they were students,

former students of his.

He and Adriana were married, and then the

two of us were in this grad program together.

Everyone was sort of very driven, but we were all real sort of nerdy and weird.

That group felt really at home.

We all felt really fun together.

That just sounds like such a magic thing, to take a space from the mall.

Like, it seems like you shouldn't be able to pull it off.

So trying to pull it off, it feels like somebody needs to do it.

This was our group project, and it was, like, a secret, right?

And it was a secret pact.

The big rule was to not bring people from outside.

So it was intended to be a fairly exclusive club, I suppose.

So there's this core team of eight artists.

That is essentially the brain trust for the creation of it,

and the curation of it, and the knowledge of the mall space.

Look at that.

It's got the instant history going on.

Oh, and the shelves are glass.

Oh, that's nice. Do these open?

Wait, what is that?

It's plastic.

Oh, my God.

Isn't it?

No, no, no. Look, this is cast.

Wait.

It's not wood. It's plastic.

We can't have this in our house.

Oh, man.

That is hot.

And it's really shoddily made, but I mean, it has the illusion of grandeur.

Yeah.

It kinda sucks that I'm more excited about this apartment

than it's like the one I'll be moving into.

You know, there's art that you see and you enjoy, and it entertains you.

And then there's art that impacts you.

And that's the kind of piece this was.

It had an impact that was both emotional and psychological and is not easily

described, which is my favorite kind of art.

My friend was like, hey, you got to go see this.

There's like underneath the train tracks, there's actually like this like weird,

creepy art exhibit that like felt like it was a mystery and who made it.

So I actually had no idea at the time anything about why it was there.

You opened up a hatch and climbed down into the was like a sewer grate,

basically, and then kind of traverse these few tunnels.

And then it opened up into a bigger open space, super wet, dank.

But then there were these sculptures of human

bodies suspended all throughout the space.

And you could walk through and sort of interact with them on your own terms.

There's no signage.

There's nobody telling you anything about what you're experiencing.

There's one day when I spent a really long time looking

for it, and I couldn't figure out how to get into it.

But I never, and I never figured it out.

I think you had to like go between the train tracks.

I'm not even sure actually where the entrance to the tunnel is now.

I think that the body tunnel, you could call it a

stunt, you could call it an installation art piece.

What makes it art for me is that it asked me to imagine a setting for art that was

not the setting that I had been told art happened in.

I'm not sure when I put two and two together that it was Mike's piece.

I think that probably came much later.

But like, I just remember, you know, that was like one

of my favorite secret spots in Providence to take people.

And I think Michael was very discreet about it.

I don't think he was promoting it.

Him finding that tunnel was, I think, an offshoot of just

like all of us exploring just whatever we could find.

But where we were mostly just exploring stuff, Michael was sort of putting his

artistic practice like into those spaces, like putting

things in the spaces and messing around with the spaces.

And he's always been an inspiration.

I went to the RISD summer program and Mike was my drawing teacher.

He did something very rare and very unusual, which was that he expected you to

have a genuine personal connection to the work that you made.

It was a way of living, not some sort of produced object that can be seen,

you know, in a museum, something like that.

Most of us, myself, certainly came to that

program thinking art is a thing you do on paper.

And Mike exploded our understanding of what art is or could be.

So it was the start of a decade of life that has had a massive impact on me.

Mike was like a super involved teacher, like different

than any teacher I had had up until that point, for sure.

He kind of approached art in a different way definitely

than anything like I'd been exposed to before.

Where it was kind of like, what do you actually want to make and why?

What Michael was able to introduce to me, which was so powerful at that age,

was that I could actually just look inside

myself and find things that were worth sharing.

So yes, like that class with Mike helped to galvanize me to find my way to publicly

engaged work.

For Mike, the difference between art and life is very hard to discern.

Art and life are two very porous things for him.

And so he thinks of art projects as being so deeply incorporated into his life.

And that's something you probably will hear from

other people, this life as art, art as life thing.

And that's something that like, as a young person, it was super impactful

to see somebody living in a way that felt like all of it was the art.

The secret apartment was the art.

The teaching was the art.

The interacting with other people was the art.

All the stuff together is what makes life meaningful.

And I think that's like, something I've been trying to do since I was a teenager.

So the secret apartment, nestled down in here, kind of floating above the train

tracks, kind of tucked in between the backside of all the stores.

We had a couple of different ways of getting in.

Our exterior entrance was basically right alongside the train tracks.

There was a gap in between a couple of walls that would allow you to get into the

bowels of the building pretty much.

And we were able to shimmy along some walls to get access to where the space was.

Additionally, we could get into the same zone of the mall where the secret

apartment was, basically from any emergency exit door on this side of the building.

That would lead you into a serpentine bunch of staircases

and hallways somewhere along that serpentine path.

There were a couple of different ways we could access the secret apartment.

Because this building is made of a bunch of really odd shapes.

I mean, you can see, like, the way that the angle follows the river and the way

that that curve follows the highway, the building

has a bunch of weird intersecting shapes.

So I think the space that we discovered was really a negative space in between two

planes of the building, which created sort of a triangle in between two parts of the

building, which is where the secret apartment was.

The food court is this sort of third level up here.

And the bathrooms, I think our most frequently used bathroom was on the first

floor, sort of like the main retail drag of the mall.

There were bathrooms on each floor.

I feel like we used the ones on the first floor

the most because they were closest to the entrance.

So the secret apartment being down in here, we

can have a look at it by taking this roof off.

And we

can pull that out.

So there's Andrew, James, Jay, myself, Emily, Greta, Adriana,

and Michael all hanging out in the space together.

So additionally, just for fun, hidden in here is the Optio S5i.

Amazingly, still works.

Just needed a charge of the battery.

I can probably sneak a little picture of the apartment or two if it'll focus.

Once we wanted to really make this an apartment that was ours, as opposed to

just a room in the mall, we decided we needed to make it so we had access to it

without having other people have access to it.

So the apartment in the mall had this big gaping

space that looked down into a storage area.

You would come up this steep metal staircase and

you would just be looking into the apartment.

So there was a real necessity to build a wall there.

Building a wall was going to be the thing that made it even more invisible in the

sense that, like, another cinder block wall with another door just becomes

another thing that if anyone walks through

the space, they're not going to bat an eye at.

So many cinder blocks, like, that would be a... Yeah, even just that one wall...

carrying up at a time.

Four or five.

A lot of a lot.

Obviously the main feat of that whole thing was just moving that many cinder blocks.

I think, you know, we calculated it was like, you know, four and a half or five

thousand pounds of cinder block.

So that was, you know, a couple of tons.

The issue of bringing things in here is obviously the hot one.

Because, like... That's our only liability.

Right, you have to do it over...

and over... and over... and over again.

From the time we popped the trunk, to the time all the cinder blocks,

we're literally through the doors of a minute and a half.

How long does that alarm sound?

Two minutes exactly.

It's a psychological deterrent.

And apparently nothing else.

In regards to security, we're thinking about it all the time.

There are constant presence in our mind.

But it's important to emphasize that there's no, no

part of me that has any interest in duping security.

I don't...

I don't feel any thrill in that.

They have a job to do.

I respect that job.

I also just want to do my job.

We're heading off.

All right.

Yeah, we'll see you in like ten minutes.

Alright, bye.

There was no way to prepare for it.

Like, we didn't know what circumstances would trigger us being caught.

We had no idea who would approach us or in what level of hostility it would be.

We just would be ready to explain ourselves in whatever moment unfolded.

Now, I have, up until that point, a career in explaining myself.

My work as an artist means that I am constantly explaining

my presence to police officers, to city officials.

It is a space I feel very comfortable in.

You know, we were on a multi-leg journey coming from Home Depot.

You know, we got these cinder blocks at Home Depot and now we're going to the mall.

Does it change anything we're doing?

No, it doesn't change a thing.

Because we had the good excuse.

Yeah.

vv

Conviction.

Eye contact.

I guess we should just...

We're fine.

So yeah, it's kind of amazing.

I told the security guard that we had gone to Home Depot, filled the car with cinder

blocks, come to the mall, had done some shopping,

and came back to a car that could not move.

So, we had arranged to move the cinder blocks down the stairwell to an awaiting

friend's truck.

And he led us on our way.

And I know that has a lot to do with just who we were.

like, a shield of white privilege around us.

Black and brown people in the same space, doing illegal things, or doing even not

illegal things, are not treated that way and would

not be treated with the same deference as we were.

My fear of the police is not the same.

I'm not worried about risk to my body and life.

You know, simultaneously to this, I was working with Mike on tape art,

which is Mike's sort of organization that will go around and do public murals,

do temporary public murals made out of masking tape.

One of the more notable ones was going to Hasbro

Children's Hospital and making murals there.

I first became aware of tape art and heard about Michael through probably some artist

friends, that there was some guy out there

who was using tape and drawing on the wall.

And I thought, I don't know, this is, sounds quirky and kooky, and what does he do?

I mean, how is this going to appeal to kids?

So, I had a lot of questions.

Tape art is a unique process.

I don't know any other artists, frankly, who were doing tape art.

Michael was the first one I met, and I've never met anybody since.

I think I was fascinated by the uniqueness.

So, the more I watched him, the more I

realized that, you know, he was truly a master.

The patient's immediate reaction is, first

of all, they're very open to something new.

And it was, again, a little odd.

It wasn't somebody coming in with drawing paper and a brush or crayons.

It was somebody coming in with five rolls of

blue tape on his arm and swinging them around.

And then the kid would often say, you know, what's going on?

What are you going to do with that tape?

And Michael would take it from there.

Michael did have a crew of people.

You know, what they drew, the mice and the horses and the mermaids.

It was that they were able to engage the child in

conversation about, what do you want on your wall?

So that when Michael and his team walked into the room, he didn't come in with an

idea of what he was going to do.

He let the child lead him.

And when possible, of course, if the patient was mobile, they'd engage the

patient in actually helping him to create the mural.

But now the patient is involved in a creative activity and has a responsibility

to seeing what's happening on the wall of his room and changing his environment.

Having a sense of control.

So I think that the patient just got lost.

Could be for 15 minutes and it could have been, you know, for a couple of hours.

Michael was coming in at least once a week and

he was one of the first people that I hired.

So I would say he was, yeah, he was here for at least 15 years.

Funding was tough, but free lunch was provided.

If they came in the morning, they could stay for lunch.

If they came in the afternoon, they could come early.

And we always provided a free lunch for them.

And I think they were pretty grateful for that, because I don't think many of them,

I don't think they ate during the day.

I think one of the first questions kids and staff and families always asked,

what's going to happen to this mural now that's on the wall?

And Michael always made it very clear that there was

an impermanence and it was really for the here and now.

And he said, you know, we'll create a new one tomorrow.

Think of something new that we could do.

So Michael had an interesting beginning.

Because his father was in the Marine Corps, we lived in

eight different places before he was seven years old.

I think it made him very open-minded.

I think Michael takes in all kinds of people, all kinds of social situations.

So basically, I think that's what's made him someone who's at home anywhere.

So let's get you this one, and this one, the blue one.

So basically, it's like a form of, like, tempered graffiti.

And it gives you a lot of freedom.

So I was brought up in a military family.

Both my parents were in the military, and their parents were in the military,

and I believe their parents were in the military.

So my brother and I were the first ones to sort of break that lineage.

In Mike's case, I don't want to speak for him, but it just

was never, never seemed like it would be a good fit for him.

He was far too creative growing up, and I think a military career would have

restricted his level of creativity that just abounded.

No words or letters are the only rule.

Good luck.

Let's work on that together.

Make sure you got that one technique down.

Don't pull it.

Just let it hang.

And very gently.

That looks really good.

Yeah, keep going, keep going.

Michael as a person is all about involving people in a collaborative process of art.

And I've seen that in a lot of cases, that he's just a very selfless person.

And that is something really, yeah, that is something really special about Michael.

Yeah.

So the cynic might say that you're not going

to make the world a better place with your art.

But like maybe you're not gonna make the entire world a

little better, but maybe you'll make one person's life better.

And then somebody else's life better.

It becomes the ripples in the pond effect.

So the main priorities in my career have always been making art and teaching art

and trying to use that art to have positive impacts on other people's lives.

There's not a lot of money in that.

I work in a nonprofit museum.

Michael is an artist.

We are not swimming in money, either of us.

And Michael does, he takes it, sometimes he doesn't take it seriously and

I've gotten upset.

Like he will text me pictures of his bank account

that has 41 cents and he thinks that's funny.

And I see the text and I'm like, this is not funny.

And I've had to talk to him about like, could you

please not send me this when you have like a dollar?

This is not, like this doesn't make me laugh personally.

This is our next ode to...

our relationship with this large monstrosity.

Is to go in there and actually consciously and very carefully

develop the space so that it's a...

It represents an actual domestic living space.

Before Week I The Mall, we hated that place.

Like we just, we didn't, the mall was,

we genuinely disliked it.

We felt the disdain for it as a place.

And as a place that had affected our lives in a very, very deep way.

That's funny because to me it's just a mall.

Well, to me it's not a mall.

And a lot of that has to do with the evolution of this space over here.

Because that space over there had my favorite building in Providence.

Now it is gone.

If you can talk about the idea that there was or is

a gentrification that's happening here?

It's pretty easy to finger this building as the beginning of that.

So you like this thing now?

I love the place now.

As a member of the city, I acknowledge its existence.

And, uh, the way that it acknowledges us is by just

leaving us alone and letting us move in.

We are no different than like a barnacle on a whale.

The whale is designed. The barnacle attaches itself.

The whale doesn't care.

So let's count full bricks first.

So we have...

- 48. - Yeah.

So we need 72 and we have 48.

So it's like four more runs with cinder blocks.

Fuck.

Okay.

So let's make this as thick as we can.

After we had a little run in with security, that encounter forced us to

rethink how we're bringing the cinder blocks in.

And we're like, well, we have a private entrance.

So the entrance we had used to initially discover the space in the first place

became the way that we bring the cinder blocks in.

I think good day's work right there.

I say we leave these cinder blocks here for now...

because we got plenty over there to start building with.

We just got to get ourselves set up.

Yeah, let's go over there and chill out. Yeah.

What you're seeing here is...

Oh, they're all sort of marked.

Oh, that's Better Living... The Children's Hospital.

And where's Alfred P. Murrah?

Children's Hospital.

Museum of Art...

- National Memorial. There it is. - Yeah, there it is.

So at the same time the core group of eight of us were working in the apartment

in the mall, we also took a trip collectively to go to Oklahoma City for

the 10th anniversary of the Alpha Pimura Federal Building bombing.

Mike was there doing tape art in Oklahoma City when that happened and made a mural.

I think he was the only non-medical personnel allowed in the home base and

made a mural for basically the sole audience of the first responders.

Folks seem to like the idea of it being an optimism mural.

That's more about individuals being able to have freedom and flight and maybe

through the help of other people they can achieve that.

Like that wall right there...

That is downtown Oklahoma City.

We have a great place to stay. We have a great wall.

The wall is check-out.

That looks amazing.

So we planned a trip back to OKC like on the anniversary

of the bombing to kind of do more work with the community.

Special care is a facility.

They have 14 cases of autism.

And, you know, lots of kids with cerebral palsy.

And I set up just a rolling schedule,

and the classes just roll to us.

The group of us spent a full week there working at like a memorial site and doing

projects in schools.

Basically like a little elite strike force team of empathetic artists.

I don't think that artists are obliged to go out and do good works,

or to try to pretend that,

making art has to sort of like save the world or feed the children

or do any kind of like, you know, nice crunchy thing that people might want.

But if you can and if there's an opportunity, why not?

You have the chance to use the skill that you have to do something good.

And also, you know, I do really believe that art and

aesthetic experience are good in and of themselves.

That they're not means to anything, but that they make life better.

If anyone's interested,

you can do this.

If you want to work in a hospital, in a hallway with

you know just like, hospital kids

this is an opportunity to do it.

So...

anyone wants to do that?

Sounds great.

It's funny.

I imagine when people heard like the one

snippet of there was an apartment in the mall.

It's not the first thing that they think people would be using it for is kind of

planning and discussing things around these big public art projects that we were doing.

The effort of making these things is a...

something that really really gets...

Like, hits people.

I've seen many an adult cry looking at what we've made so far.

I know the majority of that is based on the fact that it is September 11th,

but the artwork has an impact on just citizens.

Like, everyone being a survivor of September 11th.

The central project in our life was the September 11th Memorial.

It was all-consuming.

We had made the decision to draw 500 portraits, life-size, simple silhouettes,

of every fireman and every airline passenger

that passed away at the World Trade Center.

Okay.

There is Saraceni.

Number 38, heart one.

He's here.

We're gonna walk to the other side of this square right here and put a figure,

um, Mr. Russell.

It's gonna be about a block that direction.

Mike had drawn these four large hearts over the island of Manhattan.

And we would basically go down to New York.

We'd follow that path and just find locations

on that to try and do a drawing of a figure.

And we'd document it.

And then this, like, web memorial, we'd go back and make sort of,

like, a web page showcasing that documentation.

Portraits of people who died on September 11th along the path of four hearts.

So, like, walking those paths and drawing, I think, every block a person.

And those were all temporary drawings.

You know, you're in public.

You're in the streets of Manhattan.

You're trying to go quick.

We almost never had permission to make the work.

So you're trying to not get busted.

If you got busted, you could just remove the mural.

The tape isn't permanent.

But as far as tape art goes, kind of an intense scenario.

You're trying to honor the circumstance, the people you're representing,

and the seriousness of it all.

But you're also interacting with people in the public who

are curious to know what you're doing or if it's illegal.

Yeah, it was like a great drawing challenge.

See these four hearts here?

Yes.

These four hearts span the entirety of Manhattan.

One, two, three, four.

Yep.

And right now, we are working on part one.

So we're right now right about here.

And these hearts, if you were to connect the dots between all these figures that

we're drawing, you would be drawing out these fantastically large hearts.

Wow.

We would hop in the car in Mike's Toyota and drive to New York to do drawings over

the course of a couple of days.

With a goal, some section of a heart.

And then, with the documentation, we would head back to Providence,

where we would compile the next set of collages.

And then once a good window presented itself to head back to New York,

we'd hop back in the car and get to it.

It took a long time.

Years.

First, this project, when it started, we thought maybe two, three years,

stretched out to five years.

All of these efforts pretty much, like, was all volunteer.

The HOPE project was completely self-funded.

I mean, I know that Mike's every bit of money that he

made went directly back into paying for the HOPE project.

Mostly the paying for it was, you know, all of our labor was completely volunteer.

But for me, just thinking about meaningful things I've done in my life, that's

something I look at as really, truly meaningful artwork.

I'm not sure, but the project that we made, to

be honest, I don't even know how it exists now.

I'm not sure if it even exists to this day.

The apartment was the side project to the other staff.

The HOPE project, Oklahoma City projects, the work at the hospital, that was,

I believe, our focus as a team.

You know, the mall project felt like a way for us

to have maybe more fun than thinking about tragedy.

Which, for a couple years, we were, like, really thinking about tragedy all the time.

[ Door alarm buzzing in the distance ]

God damn it.

Remember that thing I was telling you about, about not putting your

tools on the thing or it might fall in?

It just happened.

Yes, it just happened.

Lame!

[ Door alarm buzzing in the distance ]

It's gonna be an awful day when that door opens.

I know, I know.

The only thing the makes it better is our door.

Yeah.

And then it's gonna be a really awful day when our door opens.

Once you have your own wall, then you get your own door.

And then you have your own lock, and then you get your own key.

So, our whole team had a key to an apartment in the mall.

Holy smoke.

So, what I didn't realize when I was initially looking at these photos,

this step down here that's happening in the cinder blocks, I was, like, weird.

Yeah, poor craftsmanship.

Because you had built it.

Right.

Ah.

But that brings, like, a certain degree of charm.

So, with the couch, you can tell it's a pretty big

couch from the amount of people that are fitting on it.

Sectional.

Oh, it's a sectional.

Yeah.

Can you draw for me, roughly, like, the floor plan

or just the orientation of walls and stuff as you?

So, this is our front door.

This is our back door.

Whoa.

We had a couch here.

We had our entertainment system on a little tiny table with a TV.

And there was a dresser out here.

Rugs.

Lamps.

You didn't have outlets, did you?

No.

But we had the extension cord.

- Here. - Okay.

- Down. - Oh, my God.

One story.

Into... over here.

The door is there.

The couch is basically here.

The little table is basically here.

Mm-hmm.

We walked to the...

That puts the...

That puts the China cabinet here.

Okay.

Getting it to look right.

Like, this is too distressed.

No. No, no. It's not. That's not.

That's brick.

That's closer.

Closer.

That's it! That's what it looked like!

Yeah, with the folks from Providence who are helping on this project, it was pretty

easy for me to rope them in because I just said, remember that time.

Those people lived at the mall.

How would you like to rebuild that room?

You know, we're working with a tight budget, but everyone's really excited

about the project, so we're doing the best we can.

I think everyone was sort of willing to pitch in and just being a little scrappier.

There's a lot of free items that we're running around and picking up.

We're basically doing what these guys did.

You know, the way that they were finding their furniture was often times at

Salvation Army or things that they were finding on the side of the road.

And we're doing a sort of expedited version of that.

I think more than anything, I want Michael and Adriana and Andrew and Colin,

whoever else, to walk into the space knowing that it's just a recreation for

a documentary, but having it sort of evoke the memory of the space.

What?

Bring your own precious items, choose a shadow box.

A shadow box will help make a unique keepsake.

This might be something we need for our space.

Wait a second.

Hey, Glenn.

I have some people who want to do the shadow box.

If you could meet them at Design Studio.

All right. So you guys brought some stuff?

Some of us brought stuff.

Where are you guys from?

You don't know?

Here.

Around here.

All right. So I guess the general idea is that you get

a shadow box, buy a shadow box from here.

And you guys can assemble it and I'll help you out.

My name is Glenn.

I graduated from RISD.

Oh.

With a master's in sculpture.

And I teach at Brown.

So I was hired at Pottery Barn to do shipping receiving.

The company was trying to promote shadow boxes.

So they wanted to do a workshop.

So I did it.

So when they came in, they were really excited and jovial.

And they were like, we're into this.

They sort of explained who they were, what kind of art they made, that they were

from Eagle Square and that they got kicked out.

I had been to Eagle Square.

So I knew kind of the situation.

You know, we had this connection going.

And then they started to tell me, you know, slowly kind of leaked out.

And then I will share with you cause it's of note is in our explorations of the mall,

we have found some extraordinary large and abandoned spaces and

we've been slowly, methodically moving in.

And don't pass this on, obviously,

We have a fully furnished apartment.

In here?

In the mall.

Really? That's hilarious.

So you're basically home.

Yeah.

In some way.

Yeah. No. We're home in a very real way, unfortunately.

It was pretty clear from the beginning that they wanted

to know more information about the mall.

And I was there inside about that.

We can't figure out how to get into the tower.

Oh, really?

I have no idea.

I bet you have to figure it out.

Like, is there any place you can actually go and just take a shower?

Can you get mail delivered to you here?

I think we need a post office box.

Here?

Yeah.

And then you'd have to rent space in order to get one.

You might.

If we can get mail to come here, then we've done it.

Once we can get mail here, man...

Then we can have all our junk mail sent here from the mall to the mall.

Right.

I really like it.

Damn, that's really good.

I like it.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Good job.

Yeah, thanks for your material and time.

Well, come down sometime and show me where the place is.

If we get discovered...

Yeah.

What is your sense of...

What would happen?

They'd probably want back pay for rent.

Yeah, we have a location problem. Alright...

Have a great day.

Alright, thank you very much. Thank you.

So, after they left, you know, of course, there

were all the questions from the other employees.

You know, what's this about?

And I just told them it was an art project.

Here we go...

So, this is our home.

This door also has a lock, just like our door did.

And, um, it's locked.

So, I can't go in the apartment.

This is the weird thing about the mall apartment,

is that it makes you feel really relaxed.

It's this paradox, right?

It's a little prison-like, because there's

this cement wall and there's no natural light.

And you could be discovered at any moment.

There's this weird sense of freedom where no one's gonna bother you.

You're not gonna be late for anything.

It's just this really quiet refuge, in a way.

You're on, like, the inside-out version of a

building that you're never supposed to experience.

Um, and so, it's like being in the belly of a beast.

In some ways, we had this raw black box.

It was a bit of a space station, self-imposed prison cell.

There was no windows.

There's no light.

And it was about this desire to cultivate it and make it more human.

Sleeping in the apartment was, I think, really cold, usually.

And we had, like, some sleeping bags, at least in the winter.

It was definitely really hot in the summer, too.

And incredibly dark.

Slept on this couch a lot.

Probably the most, for me, the most nights in a row would

have been four or five or something like that, I think.

We had tried different, like, sleeping arrangements.

But I remember Mike and I doing this on this couch a lot.

The head-to-foot sleeping.

And this hutch, I'm just gonna look for it.

It feels so real.

It definitely, it had a real waffle maker.

So we could make waffles in the mall apartment.

So I had this vision of staging this set of domestic bliss.

Gorgeous, very bourgeois, even within the

dusty, grimy cinder block of that apartment.

Oh, my gosh.

The cinder block, yeah.

It was, um...

It was dustier.

It was always giving off.

It was always generating kind of like a fine mist of cement.

So much of what the mall sells us is this performance of a consumer lifestyle.

And so the mall apartment was this opportunity to have this set almost where

we could play out the unrealistic and unattainable fantasies of the mall.

And the joke would be, you know what?

Oh, you love just beautifying things?

Like, so do we.

Wait a second.

The mail carrier will be available at the mail room for

accountable mail and parcels.

Where's the mail room?

I don't know, but it's a really good question to ask.

This is too good.

Well, it would just be nice to be able to receive mail here.

If we could do that, that would be a gigantic accomplishment.

It would just save us a lot of stress.

If we were able to receive a bill, we could use it as like proof of residency.

Yeah.

During the time that the apartment in the mall was being built, I was married to

Adriana.

And she had a front row seat to a lot of lunacy.

Right now I'm unsettled because we have all that stuff in there

but it's not really...

it's not really finished, in a sense.

- I mean, it'll never feel like that. - Yeah.

It needs to reach a certain state of finished and then we can

keep upping the ante when we feel the inclination, the time.

The only problem I have is that I know Saturday is mall time.

It's just like, I want to spend my Saturday working on our house.

Right, right.

You know, because our house doesn't have a floor and...

there's a lot of things that need to be done.

As egotistical as it sounds, it's something I just really, really, really want to do.

Like it moves me, and being here moves me, setting up the space moves me.

You need these kinds of projects to be who you are and to survive,

and I completely understand that.

But the other part of it is that I don't need those projects to survive.

and I'm not you and that's okay.

But...

we do...

have a commitment to a partnership where we're working towards the same goals.

We're doing different things, but we're working towards the same thing.

and...

I'm not sure if the mall project is

threatening those goals in any sense.

I mean it's very interesting that you've phrased going down this path.

You know that it is this battle between these two homes.

Cause it has been very much "home" and our goal is pushing more and more "home".

I want a fucking home.

I want a home, but I don't want it in the mall.

I wanna buy things from the mall for my home, then bring it home.

We wanna buy things in the mall and bring them into the home here.

I know, but why are you going to spend money on that?

You know, it's very much a home in a lot of ways.

We're making a physical home, but the act of making it constantly partners

me up with people that I really like.

So...

that's an important part of it.

for me.

There was some part of me that knew this was not a good relationship.

And then I was able to realize that it was not the right thing for me.

Yeah.

This illustrates one of the core dilemmas of driving yourself

towards an art project that you really deeply believe in.

Because sometimes it's truly in the face of all reason.

Why are you spending all of that time there?

Why are you doing that September 11th project?

Why... there's no... where's the reward in any of this?

What's your end game?

Valid questions.

At this time, the apartment is starting to transform into something else.

It's evolving again.

It had started as a response to development projects in our neighborhood.

And within a couple of years, it looks like a domestic space,

but it's completely isolated from the world.

And sometimes when you're in that space, you felt like you were on the stage of a

sitcom TV show.

And I think kind of because of that feeling,

we just stopped filming ourselves all together.

And then...

We had had this break-in...

They were two guys, young guys, maybe 20, 21, something like that,

who were new security guards at the mall.

I think they were just going through every door, and they

came upon the door that they did not have the key to.

So they just kicked the door down.

So Colin and I entered into the apartment to try to figure out what's happened.

Our door's been broken in.

But when we enter into the apartment, we can quickly assess that someone else

has been spending time there, and it's not us.

And there's evidence of entertainment dispersed throughout.

But things have also been stolen.

Our PlayStation, weirdly enough, was the thing that was gone.

And then there were some other of our personal effects that were gone.

We had some framed pictures and stuff to make it feel a little homier.

Those were the things that were gone.

I think they took the PlayStation because it had all

of our save dates for the games we were playing on it.

So that's just a record of all the visits in the last couple of months.

And they took our photo album because it had just photographs of us.

It was very clearly who lived in this apartment.

Busted.

Job well done.

Bravo.

We've been in this space for four years.

And there's this underlying dread that we're going to get caught at any time.

And after we were broken into, we just stopped

going to that space during the day altogether.

And then I screwed up.

I had a friend visiting from out of town.

And I thought to myself, I'll bring her to see the space.

And I went during the day!!!

I disrespected our own rules and it blew up in my face.

All right.

But this is our secret apartment.

We've been slowly building this over the last four years.

Moving in pieces of furniture and slowly building it

up to try to make it a fully domestic space to live in.

Are you allowed to be here?

Technically, no.

We've been doing it all on the sly.

And within a couple of days, the wood floors will be in.

And we'll be one step closer.

How did you get this up here?

That is...

[ Police type radio squelching from afar ]

Yeah, so between the sound of the walkie-talkie and seeing that doorknob

turn, everything just goes into slow-mo.

And it's one of those times when you can process

a lot of scenarios in a very short period of time.

One of the possibilities is just to get out of there.

Book it.

Grab your friend, head towards the secret

passage, and that's where you're in trouble.

Because you're asking them to dive into a place

that's like pitch dark, full of ledges and I-beams.

They're probably not going to make it.

Another idea that struck me was, they were entering into my home.

So I should just invite them in....

as guests.

Treat them like royalty.

And maybe they would treat me well in return.

Hello, gentlemen, it's good to see you.

Ah!

Ah!

Too long.

You.

You, sir.

That probably wasn't going to work.

Another possibility that went through my mind is that this isn't security at all.

That maybe this is just a cool person with a

walkie-talkie on the other side of that door.

Walkie-talkies.

Yes!

Radio Shack.

Sweet!

But, after seeing those three guys step through that door in their business suits,

I knew it was over.

I remember stepping right up and saying, surprise!

Do you know who I am?

We know who you are.

You're going to need to follow us.

Our other top local story on Eyewitness News at Noon.

This is an incredible tale.

A local artist has apparently had some living space in the Providence Place Mall.

In all, eight artists were in and out of that loft area.

But there was one man who admitted that he lived there.

And now he's facing trespassing charges.

And he's also banned from the premises.

In a mall with 24-hour security, Michael Townsend was able to build a fully

livable apartment, and he used it for nearly four years.

Townsend was arrested and charged with trespassing.

A judge sentenced to him to six months probation

and ordered him to pay court costs and restitution.

When we discovered it.

A spokesman for the mall said the hidden space would be sealed up immediately.

Townsend's original charges...

Townsend's been barred from coming to the mall permanently.

Townsend was released this morning, spending just one night in jail.

His only regret is that it ended too soon.

In the next year, he planned on expanding the apartment and building an extra

bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom, all with running water.

When asked if the apartment was a work of art or just a place to live, Townsend told

us that for him, there's no line between art and life.

Bryan Cranston, NBC News Providence.

So I was told by representatives of the mall that they took down our cinder block wall,

and then moved all the cinder blocks to rebuild a new wall to block off the

entrance we had used to enter in all of those years.

Far as I know, no one's ever been in there again.

With our secret apartment in the mall, there wasn't any sense of it being permanent.

We're just going to keep building it until we reach that crescendo moment and then...

make it disappear.

So what is it?

What is it?

Is it a work of art?

Is it a social experiment?

Is it trespassing?

Is it a prank?

It's maybe all of these things.

It was this idea of reinventing everyday life

and making of everyday life an artistic project.

It talks about gentrification.

It talks about capitalism and everything being co-modified.

It's the perfect site to address issues of like...

ownership, of capital, of private versus public.

It was like this alternate universe.

It's like within the real world.

It's a crossover between installation art and performance art.

I think it was a combo of like mischief and like snark.

It seemed like a big presentational show because they don't like malls.

It felt like, meh, whatever.

I don't really get it, I will admit, which is Michael finds that hilarious.

You know, it's I try to understand why this was an art project and the deeper

um, messaging he was trying to get across by occupying unoccupied space.

And like, I've heard it, I've heard it, but I just don't really get why it's art.

I'm not sure if it moves over to the area of being artistic.

I think this is just his creative mind trying

to express itself in every possible way.

Isn't that art?

Damn it.

I've kept this key on my keychain the entire time.

Yep, this is the key.

Which used to have flames on it, but it doesn't anymore.

Well, it's here on my keychain.

Um... yeah...

I have no idea if the door is still there, so

I sometimes refer to it as my key to nowhere.

Here is my key.

It's got what's left of an American flag and an eagle on it.

You can kind of see, like, a little bit of the flames left in there.

Uh, but pretty well worn.

That was the key.

SECRET MALL APARTMENT

Other than Micael Tonsend, none of the the other 7 participants of the secret apartment were ever identified. This is the first time they have all come forward.Each is still currently an artist or working in the arts.

Micheal Townsend is still doing tape art in Providence. He lives in a former mill building, down the street from the Providence Place Mall. He is still banned there.

The Providence Place Mall has struggled greatly in recent years. In 2022, after the mall's owners defaulted on thier mortage, they anounced that they were considering putting residential apartments into the mall complex.

Jeremy Workman - Director/Producer

Sub by hamonwheat72