The Anti-Ruin: Michael Townsend and the Secret Mall Apartment
I love exploring abandoned buildings, and nothing is more thrilling than being in a building with a flashlight, having no idea where you are, and just trying to memorize all the spaces and, uh, rebuild its purpose in your mind.
And so to watch the mall get built, on my jogging route, and making my guesses. That’s a parking garage, that’s a store that’s gonna be storage. And at some point there are spaces that pop up where I’m like, I don’t know what that is. Functionally, it just doesn’t make any sense.
And there was a space of particular note where they seem to store a lot of construction materials. We found the space. 750 square feet of, I’m gonna use, say the words, “underutilized space,” the exact same vocabulary that was used to describe our homes. They looked at our artist studios and they referred to it as “underutilized space.” And the argument for years was that they had a responsibility. The developers believed in their hearts that they had the right to develop our space.
And having spent two years in conversations with them and city planners, I realized that confronted with underutilized space as a citizen of Providence, I had a right and a responsibility to develop it. And that set off, a four-year adventure of building it out and turning it into a domestic living space.
— Michael Townsend
There was this dark wooden chair at the top of the third-floor staircase in my childhood home. The seat cushion had been upholstered in red velvet, and the underside of that seat was made up of a thick canvas material woven in a crisscross pattern across the bottom. I was about 6 or 7 when I realized that I could fit my hands up in the holes of the crisscross canvas and hide things directly in the seat of the chair: coins, trinkets, cash, figurines, hospital visit bracelets.
If something I wanted to hide could fit through one of the criss-crosses, there it went. The more treasure I stored in my makeshift safe, hidden in plain sight, the more I reveled in its secret. There was something so delightful, so mischievous about knowing that, when I saw someone sitting on that chair, I knew something they didn’t. It thrilled me in a way that finding the perfect stowaway spot during a game of hide-and-go-seek still makes me smile.
I think there’s a kind of safety in a secret, in having something that only you know, tucked away from the outside world, only yours, a tiny truth that’s just for you and only for you. It wasn’t as if I was breaking any rules — I just had a secret, and that secret wasn’t causing anybody harm. And for almost three decades, I’ve kept quiet about my secret chair compartment — until now.
And that secret chair compartment was the first thing I thought of when the lights came up after the first time I watched Jeremy Workman’s newly-acclaimed documentary Secret Mall Apartment, produced by Jesse Eisenberg, about a group of artists in Providence, Rhode Island who, in the early 2000s, did the unthinkable, which the title of the film may suggest: they built a secret apartment inside an incredibly active and extremely large public mall, the Providence Place Mall. Not that I can possibly compare to building and successfully occupying, in secret, for almost five years, a secret mall apartment. But gosh, does this story make me feel gleeful, and incredibly nostalgic, and maybe even a little bit hopeful, somehow.
On today’s bonus episode of abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast, you’re going to meet the undesignated leader of that now-infamous group of scoundrels — and learn why Michael Townsend thinks that art, in all of its limitless possibilities, feels most sacred when it’s temporary. This interview was originally aired live on Cinema Kingston!, a late night radio program I co-host with my creative partner Jeremiah Wenutu on WKNY. You may recognize Jeremiah’s voice from a couple episodes of season 2, and in the upcoming short film I produced with HUDSY, All-American Ruins: Universal Atlas Cement Plant, you’ll get to catch Jeremiah reprise one of those roles, but on the screen.
More on that at a later date. For now, I hope you enjoy:
“The Anti-Ruin: Michael Townsend and the Secret Mall Apartment.”
