Enter the Metaverse at Providence Place

You can’t get more meta than watching Secret Mall Apartment at the scene of the crime, Providence Place. Adding to the inception of the film is the underlying theme of impermanence – buildings, murals made from tape, relationships, and a 750-square-foot concrete nook modified with sweat equity and grit – are all designed to change or disappear. The latter was furnished with stuff from the Pitman Street Salvation Army into a secret hangout for eight friends to play video games, eat pizza, and sometimes sleep on the couch for four years, until it was discovered 17 years ago.

I recently attended a private screening of filmmaker Jeremy Workman’s documentary, produced by his frequent partner, actor/writer Jesse Eisenberg, who incidentally lived at The 903 in the shadow of the mall for months in 2006 while shooting The Education of Charlie Banks. For those unaware of the true story that sounds like the stuff of urban legends, what began as a challenge among four friends to attempt to stay inside the then-recently built 1,400,000-square-foot shopping center for a few days unscathed, quickly snowballed into a covert fellowship of eight, fiercely committed to assembling cozy digs inside what group leader, Providence artist Michael Townsend, refers to as “the nowhere space,” an area he pondered as he watched the mall get built. It turns out, the architectural design of curves and lines did indeed leave an unused gap, accessible to the nimble and quick. “We need to develop this under-utilized space,” prompts Adriana Valdez Young, Townsend’s then-wife, in a blurry archival video clip shown in the film. 

The 91-minute documentary provides seamless transitions between new interviews of the artful eight – Colin Bliss, James Mercer, Andrew Oesch, Greta Sheing, Townsend, Emily Ustach, Valdez Young, and Jay Zehngebot – and low-res footage shot by Townsend at the time of installation in the early 2000s, using small cameras concealed in Altoids tins hand-held at arm’s length, long before the proliferation of smart phones and selfie-mode. Raw images offer a palpable nostalgia of the mall in its glamorous early days as a high-end pedestrian promenade, and of the bright-eyed faces of indefatiguable pals in pursuit of living a holistically artful life. Workman also provides context for the posse’s motives to claim ownership, giving screen time to the importance of Fort Thunder to the Creative Capital, a textile factory in Olneyville’s Eagle Square section turned alt-culture epicenter, inhabited by group members before being evicted to demolish the Civil War-era building in 2002 to make way for a shopping plaza. The score by Clare and Olivier Manchon keeps the pacing suspenseful with punk rock riffs thrown in for good measure.

There is also time devoted to painting a picture of the group’s collaborative work as altruistic artists, affixing fanciful murals of outlines and silhouettes using painter’s tape on hospital walls to bring joy to cancer patients, and also spending many years stealthily tape-bombing portraits of people killed on September 11 around Manhattan in tribute. “We were like an elite strikeforce team of empathetic artists,” says Colin Bliss in the film, a senior academic technologist at Rhode Island School of Design. 

Today, the group all appear to be living artistic lives, and Townsend is not only allowed to return to the mall (after being banned), but was invited by current management to adorn interior walls with tape art, including an expansive display of 10 people across the windows of where Tiffany & Co. used to be. Not even diamond stores last forever.

For more information and upcoming showtimes at Providence Place and beyond, visit SecretMallApartment.com.