SECRET MALL APARTMENT

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Michael. Yes, welcome to the show. It's Michael Townsend, Canter
in Select Theater's Secret Mall Apartment is the documentary and
we're very excited to talk to you about it.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Michael was one of the eight young Rhode Island artists
who created the apartment.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
How you doing, Michael, I'm doing well, Thank you.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
What's your what's your elevator pitch? So we all know
what happened here?

Speaker 3 (00:20):
Well the movie. The movie is called Secret Mall Apartment,
and it's about a group of artists that, in the
wake of losing their homes from development projects, sort of
ripping through their neighborhood, turned their attention to the largest
development project in RhE Island's history, which is this eleven story,
one point three million square foot shopping center. And we

(00:43):
found a small, little underdeveloped space and we became the
developers and we built a condominium inside the shopping mall
and had control of it for four years.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
So many questions like, first off, like what kind of
eyesight do you have that you saw during the building
of the Providence Place mall well that there was going
to be some unused space. How did you see that.

Speaker 3 (01:03):
I'm a public artist, which means that I spent all
my time exploring buildings, drawing on buildings. I love architecture,
I love how buildings are made, and so I had
taken up jogging, very slow jogger. I had a nice,
luxurious view of this building as it was being made,
as I ran past it every other day, and as

(01:26):
it's being built, I'm starting to make my gases. Okay,
those are gonna be stores. That's gonna be a parking garage.
That's gonna be storage. And as the skin of the
mall starts to go on, there were some spaces I
was like, I don't know, I don't know what that's
gonna be used for. And in the skinning of this mall,
I also saw entrances, little tiny spaces between walls that

(01:48):
you could sneak in through. So between those two things,
knowing how to get in and what I should be
aiming towards, we're able to find these mystery spaces, these
forgotten spaces. And sure enough, there was one that was
so off the radar that we had free reign of
it for forty.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
Heres Where in the mall was it located in the basement.

Speaker 3 (02:10):
No, it was sort of I used the phrase I
used to mid Mall, which means that story is up.
It's sort of nettled between the three major things, nettled
between the stores, nettled between the parking garage and the
store spaces. It's sort of getting a hug from all
those types of spaces.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
Michael Townsend, one of the eight artists behind the Secret
Mall Apartment, a documentary and Selects Theaters. Now, I mean
we were on HJY when you were living in that,
maul Quinn, and I envision you listening to us listening
to ninety four h JY at night in your illegal apartment.
But okay, so let me ask Michael. So you say
that you eight of you lived there and there was

(02:49):
a rule about no outsiders, but you didn't exclusively live there.
What's the longest amount of time you would stay?

Speaker 3 (02:55):
Yeah? Yeah, so we down the street. We had a
studio space, an old horse barn from the eighteen hundred,
So that's the place where we no heat, no air conditioning,
but we had a shower. So that answer is like
where we could reach eat to the longest stretch. I
would stay there for weeks at a time. Sometimes we

(03:16):
were taking our sweet time to sort of get everything
into place. The projects unfortunately well and fortunately was ended
right before we put in operational plumbing right and the
hard work floor.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
So tell our audience, Michael, what you did have in
your secret model apartment in Providence.

Speaker 3 (03:40):
Sure, the apartment was. When I describe it, it was
it sound like I'm just describing this a normal home.

Speaker 4 (03:45):
Right.

Speaker 3 (03:46):
We've got a four paced sectional accounch. We've got our
entertainment sections, we've got our our you know, our bureaus
stilled with our clothes. We've got the kitchen area with
china hutches and matching china and dining sets, the old
kitchen spaces. Very normal. That's the goal. The goal is
to make it as domestic as possible.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
And how many people knew about it? And that couldn't
that had to swear to secrecy obviously.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
Well, there's the eight of us. So the eight of
us are the ones who are you know, the masterminds
of that space where the main rule is you can't
bring anybody there. There are people you know in our orbit,
you know, close friends outside the mall who knew about it.
Because it had to answer the question where did you go?

(04:33):
Like you if you did apear for for a week
or two. It's good that somebody knows where you are,
but no one was ever allowed to go in time.
I messed up one time, and that's going to be
the end of the project.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
That's when you got caught, when you broke.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
Your own rule.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
I broke my own rule.

Speaker 4 (04:53):
So parties that kind of thing, we're kind of out
of the question, with the exception of just you guys,
and like who paid for like, I don't know how
much how many tons of concrete cinderblocks you guys had
to get.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
You did build your own wall?

Speaker 3 (05:06):
Yeah, yeah, no, we we paid for it. So we're
all working artists. We're doing big projects, tape art projects.
So as artists, the main meeting that keeps us together
is tape art. We are people who draw on buildings
with tape, making huge straws, sometimes two or three stories
hi one hundred feet across. We get paid for those jobs,

(05:27):
and then we would just take the money from that
and use it to pay for all of the other
artworks we were doing.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
You guys were regulars at the mall when you got caught.
Were there people did the guy at the theater go
I wondered why I saw you here so often.

Speaker 3 (05:43):
The people that we were sort of closest to were
the Kiosks people. The Kiosk people are really cool because
they sort of like live on these little islands. They're
by themselves and they're very chabby, right, So if anybody
like realized that we had just did disappeared, it would
be the Kiosk folks.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
It's a secret mal apartment. Look for the documentary and
select theaters. So when you got arrested, and I won't
get into how you got arrested, but how much legit
trouble did you guys get.

Speaker 3 (06:11):
In Province Food Island is very let's call it, let's
call it art friendly or artist friendly. Awesome?

Speaker 1 (06:17):
I agree.

Speaker 3 (06:18):
And the more they described the apartment, the more the
judge was internalizing that it wasn't a prank past plank ritory, right,
So he he the phrase he said is he said,
he said, I don't. He's like, I don't know what
this is, but it's not criminal awesome. I'm going to
give you misdemeanor trespassing. And it's like, and don't be

(06:38):
a jerk for six months.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
The movie is called Secret madel Apartment. It's Michael Townsend.
Awesome luck with the movie, your inspiration to us all.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
Mike, I couldn't talk to you for an hour. Michael,
take care, buddy,