Secret Mall Apartment: Not Approved by Airbnb, OSHA, or Any Known Fire Marshal

By spider73 Former Trespassing Warehouse Resident

Now before we get into this back in the early ’90s, me and my buddies did what every group of teenage punks should do, we started a band even though none of us knew how to play squat. We rented a practice space in a gigantic, half-abandoned warehouse. Some spaces had bands. Some had freaky dudes with a single desk and a rotary phone who sounded like they were selling magic beans to the government. I practically lived there 75% of the time. I had a fridge, a pull-out bed, a TV right along with all of our music equipment. My girlfriend at that time would even spend the night a couple times a week. There was one bathroom with a toilet and a large crusty industrial sink so it had a extra punk aesthetic. It was glorious. It wasn’t just a crash pad it felt right. Sacred, even. Just for a summer.

Watching Secret Mall Apartment took me right back to that feeling.

Michael Townsend a guerilla artist from Providence, Rhode Island who is like Mister Rogers and Keith Haring having a lovechild savant who dumpster dives for his art supplies. Back in the early 2000s, he was part of this artists’ collective called Fort Thunder, which is basically the kind of place that makes Portland look like Disneyland. It was a legendary DIY space in an old warehouse that hosted a plethora of live music, underground art, the whole beautiful chaotic mess. You could make a 12-part Ken Burns miniseries just about that building and scene.

But cue the bulldozers and Fort Thunder gets steamrolled to make way for a mega-mall. Your standard American monstrosity of Auntie Anne’s pretzels and JCPenney’s husky size jeans. Most people would’ve just ragezined about it and moved on. Not Michael. Nope. This dude studies the mall construction so methodically and carefully he figures out a weird, unused “dead space” built right into the place. Big enough to live in. So what does he do?

He moves in with friends and fellow artists and live inside a shopping mall for FOUR YEARS. I repeat: Four. Dang. Years. Right there in the belly of consumerism’s neon lit beast, and nobody noticed.

They sneak in furniture. A couch. A bed. A TV. They basically turn this forgotten architectural armpit into a secret clubhouse for artists. It’s like if the Ninja Turtles were vegan performance artists who planned tape sculptures for children’s hospitals instead of fighting Shredder.

And I’m not talkin’ YouTube stealth camping with GoPros and drone shots. This was 2003. These guys were lugging in potato quality megapixel cameras and crawling through drainage tunnels that would send mildly claustrophobic people into cardiac arrest. It was raw. It was real. It was beautiful.

One of the best parts of the film is when they show a previous project of Michael’s a suspended sculpture installation deep inside a sewer tunnel. People had to crawl through rain filled pipes to reach it. And once they did? Boom. They found themselves in a quiet, otherworldly cathedral of wire bound humanoid forms. It’s the kind of thing that hits you right in the spirit gland. That sequence alone is worth the watch.

This is the mall that I watched Secret Mall Apartment in.

Michael’s the real deal. I hate using the word “transcendent” ‘cause it sounds like something you read in a yoga brochure, but I’m gonna say it: his art transcends. It’s not about making stuff to hang in galleries. It’s about transforming overlooked, forgotten spaces into something holy. It’s like he’s gently whispering, “Hey, even the ugliest corners of this world are full of potential.”

And of course, like all beautiful outlaw things, it all eventually comes crashing down. But even the way it ends is weirdly heartwarming, in a “how did he get away with it this long” kind of way.

Along with remembering living in a warehouse watching this made me think about the time me and the kids in my neighborhood built a fort in the woods. It wasn’t about hiding from Cobra Commander it was instinct. We were expressing something. Together. It was art, even if we didn’t have the vocabulary to call it that yet. And that’s what this movie taps into something primal, collaborative, rebellious, and full of heart.

Providence, by the way, is now on my mental map of magical cities. Between H.P. Lovecraft, Marilyn Chambers, Cormac freakin’ McCarthy, and Michael Townsend? There’s a leyline of chaos and beauty running right through that town.

So here’s the deal: watch this movie. Make time. Not just because it’s wild and cool (which it is), but because it reminds you what it feels like to be human and to dream weird dreams with your friends. It’s a beautiful, soul filling call to action

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