Stream It Or Skip It?

In 2024, a homeless woman in Midland, Michigan was found living in the space behind a sign on a supermarket roof for a year, and asked to leave after someone spotted a curious extension cord that led to her laptop and Keurig coffeemaker. This strange story came to mind while watching Secret Mall Apartment (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), a buzzy documentary chronicling the saga of a Rhode Island artist and his pals fashioning an apartment between the walls of a shopping mall, which became a secret hangout spot for them for four years. Four years! Before anyone found them! Directed by Jeremy Workman, this is one of the year’s most thoughtful docs, musing on ideas about gentrification and what can and can’t be labeled “art.” 

The Gist: The Providence Place Mall is a behemoth, a three-story, 3.5 million square-foot retail hub plopped smack in the center of Rhode Island’s biggest city. It took four years to build and developers had to reroute the river and railroad tracks to accommodate it. Its gleaming rows of stores, food-court restaurants and a movie theater opened in 1999, with city officials and developers hoping it would revitalize downtown Providence. Local artist Michael Townsend points out how all entrances to the mall face east, in the opposite direction of Eagle Square, a bohemian district where the city’s artists and musicians lived and worked, fashioning abandoned textile mills into living spaces that blurred with DIY galleries, live music venues and art studios. It was a not-so-subtle indication that the mall was catering to upper-middle-class people with disposable income, not scrappy fringe-dwellers on the west side – scrappy fringe-dwellers who were forced from their homes when developers, hoping to capitalize on traffic to Providence Place, bulldozed the aforementioned spaces for strip malls and a supermarket.

We see a cheesy old TV commercial for the mall in which a woman cheerfully chirps, “If only I could live there!” Then we meet Michael Townsend, an upbeat fellow with sincere eyes and an ever-so-slightly mischievous grin who’s maybe best described as a compulsive creator. He dedicates his life to making art – he once built a provocative installation in a concrete tunnel beneath railroad tracks, with mannequins in various positions suspended on wires. His speciality is tape art, where he uses masking tape to create silhouettes of people and objects on walls; he once spearheaded a years-long volunteer project in New York City, putting tape-art homages to people who died on 9/11 on public walls like graffiti, and he regularly volunteers to brighten the hallways of a children’s hospital, collaborating with the patients. His works are almost always temporary. We’ll eventually learn that he moved around a lot as the child of military parents, that he’s frequently near-broke in dedicating his life to his art.

In 2003, Townsend, his then-wife Adriana Valdez Young, and friends Andrew Oesch and Jay Zehngebot decided to see if they could live in Providence Place for a week without being kicked out. Why? Because their ilk never felt welcome there, they disliked the place and they’re endowed with a gentle-prankster spirit. Sneaking through the bowels of the building, they discovered an empty 750 square-foot area and decided to make it their own no-rent apartment. Granted, they had their own homes, but they decided it could be an art project of sorts, a secret hangout space for them and four other friends. Using a camera that could fit in an Altoids tin, Townsend filmed significant portions of the project. They bought thrift-store furniture and lugged it up a steep ladder, and outfitted the area with a TV and Playstation, powered by a long extension cord. They even smuggled in dozens of cinder blocks, built a wall and installed a locked door to avoid detection. It was a secret endeavor among eight close friends. Some slept there on occasion; we see Townsend leading a planning powwow for the 9/11 project in the apartment. Nobody noticed them until 2007. 2007! Townsend: “We are no different than a barnacle on a whale… the barnacle attaches itself, and the whale doesn’t care.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Secret Mall Apartment isn’t quite the tense heist-adjacent saga of Man on Wire, but it’s in the same ballpark.

Performance Worth Watching: Townsend is a terrific representative of his community of hands-on artists, all of whom are inspiring in one way or another.

Memorable Dialogue: From a news report after Townsend finally got caught and took the fall for his friends, owning a trespassing charge: “When asked if the apartment was a work of art or just a place to live, Townsend told us that for him, there was no line between art and life. Brian Crandall, NBC News 10, Providence.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: So. Is trespassing still trespassing if it’s in an area where nobody goes for four years at a time? Where does art end and “regular” life begin? And how should we define art, anyway? Discuss!

Secret Mall Apartment poses these questions, but wisely doesn’t hazard any attempts at definitive answers. Workman hones in on Townsend, a representative example of his community’s DIY spirit, couching the artist’s story within a narrative that quietly illustrates the ideological war between creatives and capitalists. The filmmaker interviews Townsend and all parties involved in the apartment project – the other seven remained secret until the documentary was made – and visits other Providence artists in their beautifully cluttered studios and workshops so they can opine on their city, its people and the nature of art itself. The documentary’s endearingly scrappy, interlocking structure neatly reflects the spirit of Providence’s scene.

Bigger than that is how the apartment is an at-worst mischievous F-The-Man saga thumbing its nose at a gross irony: Developers gobble up space that’s incredibly valuable to city residents, and forego efficiency for spectacle. Sure, 750 square feet of dusty concrete isn’t a lot of space, or particularly desirable, but it’s plenty for a sculptor’s studio or a band’s practice space. Extend that thinking further, and a homeless family could live there. Artists, musicians, homeless people – these are so often seen as things getting in the way of capitalists seeking nothing more than financial gain. The city essentially chose to value mass-produced products over original works made by the hands of people who emphasize emotions and ideas over profit. Put yourself in Townsend’s shoes, and you’d be angry too. You’d feel justified in your pursuit of a “secret mall apartment” project that functions as potent social criticism.

Workman embellishes the documentary with some clever sequences. The filmmakers underwent their own hands-on art project, building a facsimile of the apartment so its former residents could visit it; one artist is hired to build a scale model of the mall out of wood to illustrate exactly where the secret apartment was inside. Townsend’s footage is vital to the story, capturing suspenseful moments of his quasi-stealth operation, which involved dodging security guards, talking his way out of tight spots and enduring a shrill, two-minute door alarm that they routinely set off. A shrill door alarm that no mall employee ever bothered to notice, it seems. 

As a biography of Townsend, the film illustrates how he’s a selfless, restlessly creative, sweet and frequently funny person with a good heart, and a small-scale visionary bursting with ideas. It includes a little subplot about how the apartment is a component in Townsend’s divorce; an interview with his current girlfriend finds her sharing how she doesn’t really understand why he did the apartment project in the first place. If you aren’t Townsend or someone who believes that life is art and art is life, you probably wouldn’t. Why ruin a work of art by explaining it anyway? Looking at it, touching it, sitting down in it and sharing how it makes you feel – that’s the point. Secret Mall Apartment is ultimately a portrait of someone putting positive things into the world, not just profitable things. Townsend shows no grand notion of changing the world; he just makes it a little better here and there, one person, one place, one project at a time.

Our Call: Secret Mall Apartment is one of the year’s best documentaries. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.