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The documentary follows the story of the artists who lived in the Providence Place Mall. We talked to artist Michael Townsend, who got arrested, got banned — and lived to tell the tale.
This story was never meant to be shared.
It started as a sworn secret between eight New England artists.
In 2003, Michael Townsend and seven friends moved into the Providence Place Mall. They’d discovered an empty 750 square-foot loft space. They hauled up furniture — a couch, a PlayStation, TV, waffle-maker. Hauled up two tons of cinder blocks for an apartment wall.
In 2007, mall security discovered the apartment. Townsend was arrested and banned from the mall. He named no names.
For years after, any documentation lived only as digital camera footage, taken in the days of the flipphone and meant to be “parked on a hard drive,” Townsend told me. Memories to think about from time to time, like a Polaroid in a desk drawer: a portrait of the artists as young mall-dwellers.
Today, that footage is streaming on Netflix, as part of Jeremy Workman’s gripping documentary, “Secret Mall Apartment.”
“This is an insane climb up the cultural ladder — from absolute obscurity to something where so many people have at least the option of seeing it,” Townsend, 55, tells me in our recent phone interview.
“I get arrested the summer the iPhone comes out. We were still a culture where you could point cameras and there wasn’t an assumption that it was going to be shared in any way. Documentation wasn’t the goal. It was more just survival instincts. Like, ‘If we don’t document this, then it will all be truly gone.’”
But the story never really left.
When news broke — and it was everywhere — that eight people lived for four years inside the mall — well, that’s a story that sticks around.
I, like many in southern New England, have all but grown up with this tale, now bona fide New England folklore. An urban legend, but true. If you lived through the early aughts in these parts, you at least knew the story, or your cousin or your boyfriend’s friend knew one of the artists.
The tale of the Rhode Island mall dwellers grew on Reddit threads, Providence bars, and Boston campuses. Popped up from time to time as a strange-but-true news story, or supermarket tabloid fodder.
Then, in 2018, Townsend finally told his story to a podcaster. It eventually aired as the 99% Invisible podcast, “The Accidental Room.”
My boyfriend’s friend texted and told us to listen. I was gripped. I told others to listen.
The podcast “hit the right tone to get me chatty again,” Townsend told me.
In 2019, Townsend — a tape artist who lays legitimate claim as the founder of the medium — was creating a tape art mural on the exterior glass ceiling of an opera house in Athens, Greece.
Through the glass, he recognized New Hampshire native/YouTube star Lily Hevish, being filmed for a documentary.
“I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a YouTube f—ing superstar! But who’s that dude?’” Townsend tells me with a laugh.
The dude was New York filmmaker Workman. That film would eventually be released as “Lily Topples the World.”
Over the course of a week in Athens, Townsend and Workman were “in each other’s orbit, swapping war stories,” Townsend tells me. “I mentioned the secret mall apartment. Jeremy thought I was lying. He went back to his hotel and Googled it.”
A year later, Workman asked Townsend about that secret mall apartment, and his mountain of footage.
And for the first time ever, Townsend said yes.
In 2024, “Secret Mall Apartment” — executive produced by Jesse Eisenberg — held its New England premiere at Somerville Theatre, as part of the Independent Film Festival Boston.
In 2025, it screened at Somerville Theatre as part of a national theatrical release. Eisenberg went on “The Tonight Show” to plug the national rollout, with a bit by pretending to have lived under Jimmy Fallon’s desk for years.
I was blown away by Workman’s doc. It’s no hijinx romp about living in a mall, eating Auntie Annies by day and sleeping in Eddie Bauer by night. And it’s no Page Six item — How Eight New Englanders lived in a mall for years!
What it is about is “shape-shifting,” Workman told me previously.
Gentrification was coming. Artists say in the doc that they saw encroachment on their beloved Eagle Square, an area of old mills. At its center, Fort Thunder, described by ArtForum as “a decrepit, junk-filled warehouse in Providence … for a particular breed of pilgrim, a holy site — mecca for a hyperpsychedelic art of visual and aural excess.” Musician Brian Chippendale says of Eagle Square in the film, a developer came in, (and) “people started getting kicked out.”
What was their secret mall apartment? A middle finger to gentrification? And F-you to the man? A treehouse? A Dada art piece? All of the above?
“It kept changing in front of my eyes,” Workman told me previously. “I think a viewer feels that, too. You watch this and go: ‘It’s a middle finger to gentrification … Suddenly it starts morphing … It encompasses a lot of different things for me, and I think for viewers.”
I asked Townsend how he feels.
“I see it through a fairly literal lens, which is: we lost our home,” he says with a laugh. “And were overwhelmed by scenarios completely out of our logistical and emotional control.”
Speaking of Eagle Square, I need to add that when I was texting Townsend about setting up an interview, he emoji-reacted to an interview time with an eagle emoji, instead of a thumbs up. Emoji-reaction game: on point [chef’s kiss emoji.]
Townsend, who grew up largely in Holden and now lives in Providence, R.I., works as a tape artist with collaborator Leah Smith, of Ayer. Together, the two consistently create tape art in New England children’s hospitals and schools, from Newton to Worcester, Wayland to Acton.
I reached him in Vermont, where he was working on a tape art installation in Brattleboro Museum and Art Center.
I called to ask about the mall, the apartment, the secret, and what it’s been like to (finally) tell his tale.
So this is a big moment: hitting Netflix.
It’s outrageous. I have no expectations about how it’s going to do, but it’s glorious to be in that arena. Because in these last two years of screenings and live events, the thing that’s struck me is the breadth of people interested. It’s a wild demographic throw-down.
Parents articulated to me: Hey, this is an excellent example of responding in a positive and creative way in a scenario where you’ve lost control. Where your other option is to be incredibly frustrated, or depressed, or angry. Instead, you’re seeing a group of people bond together through a unifying friendship with a larger mission.
So it wasn’t a middle finger to the Man?
No, I’ve never thought of it as anything antagonistic. Because you’ve got to consider that it wasn’t designed to be seen by anybody.
No inside group joke, tongue-in-cheek “F-you, We’re going to stay here anyway”-type thinking?
No, I think we were more quietly manifesting the rules that had been instilled on us about how these developers work. The grand mantra that if there’s an underdeveloped space, you have a responsibility to develop it.
We sat in sooo many boring meetings listening to them justify these things without any sort of bird’s-eye view of the pain of displacement. Just letting incredible pockets of creativity and people get blown into the wind. They always settle, of course, around Providence. But so many lost opportunities. It was a beautiful lack of vision. I think in the vacuum of that lack of vision, doing something like this satiates the loss.
At the same time, you were making murals at the Providence children’s hospital, and driving to New York to create 9/11 tributes. The documentary delves into both.
Our little crew decided to go to Manhattan and draw life-size silhouettes of every fireman, every airline passenger that died at the World Trade Center. So, 500 locations without permission. Five years of trips to Manhattan, where we’re thoroughly researching every single person — their face, their biography.
And we volunteered at Hasbro Children’s, working with patients — everything from accidents to cancers — doing murals on request. It was very intense.
There were days we’d wake up at the mall, go to the hospital to draw with cancer patients, retreat to computers to work on the September 11th project, go back to the mall. We were in this triangle of incredibly intense emotional works.
What sparked the first idea to move into the mall?
Living with that incredible vacuum of loss — the catalyst was there. We were losing our home at Eagle Square and decided to do an exploratory step of living in the mall for a week. We wanted to just rough-shot it, to figure out, logistically, how to make that happen.
On the very first night, looking for a place to sleep, I was able to summon up a direction to point ourselves in, based on the memory of the mall being built.
Right, you lived nearby and saw the mall go up.
I had a pretty good sense of the infrastructure. It’s inevitable that [a building that size] has lost spaces. We were able to navigate to one.
After that week, you must’ve felt a thrill, realizing you could do it.
Yeah [laughs.] We didn’t have a timeline to move in, it wasn’t going to be public. People say, “How did you not get caught?” Well, we weren’t rushing.
On top of that, two years leading up to the mall, we’d been working on the September 11 memorial on the streets of Manhattan, drawing — technically illegally — on buildings: “Do we have clearance? Are there eyes on us? How quickly can we do this?” That’s two years of push-ups.
[laughs] That’s a good way to put it. You were finally caught in 2007, after taking a friend to visit during the day. Do you remember that moment?
Oh my gosh, yes. I knew it was coming for years. From day one, we assumed we were going to be caught. So there was a small sense of relief.
I broke the one rule, which was: Do not bring anybody who’s not part of the core eight into that space. I did. And karmically, it backfired. [laughs] Security had found the space previously and routinely checked it during the day — we were primarily coming at night. I went during the day aaaaand bam. Just bumped into each other.
They called the cops.
Oh, yeah. I got arrested.
You took the hit for everybody.
Absolutely. To be fair, if the eight of us stood around and took a vote, it would be, like, eight to zero: me. [laughs]
[laughs] It was 12 years until you did the podcast, which got you chatty, you said. Why did you say yes to Jeremy?
My only prerequisites were “I’m not doing anything unless the other seven artists all say yes.” So much time had passed — that makes a big difference.
Jeremy makes films about artists. He seemed like the right guy for the task. He’s just one dude — he didn’t have a lot of people in his ear. Most importantly, he understood that you can’t tell the mall story without talking about the hospital and the September 11 art — because without that, we just look like nuthouses. To some people, we do anyway [laughs]. But those other projects help flesh out that our approaches are rooted in art.
You have so much footage. Did you have some idea that you might make a film one day?
Definitely not. I think that’s why that footage is so moving: it’s truly voyeuristic. And we didn’t film the last year and a half — nothing. We took a total of six photographs in four years. Today, someone with an iPhone, they’re gonna be like, “What the f—? I could take six photographs in three seconds.”
[laughs] Simpler times.
And that brings it back to Netflix — there now exists a chance that the spirit of the narrative will be accessible to millions. The art education part of my brain is thrilled that people might see this and be like, “You know what? Art is great.” By gosh, we need millions more people to say “Art is great.”
That’s so true. You were banned from the mall in ‘07. They unbanned you for the opening of this movie at the theater last year. Did it feel like a full-circle moment to walk back in?
Yeah. It’s really nice they did that. And intellectually, I love the humor of it being one of the craziest long-games you can play. [laughs] What a wild, slow arc to get back to that space.
Lauren Daley is a freelance culture writer. She can be reached at [email protected]. She tweets @laurendaley1, and Instagrams at @laurendaley1. Read more stories on Facebook here.
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