Secret Mall Apartment

Our other top local story on Eyewitness News at Noon.

This is an incredible tale.

Artists set up an apartment inside Providence Place Mall, going undetected for years.

We were listening to the radio and this ad came on for the Providence Place Mall.

It was this woman, she was a mom, and she was talking about how great her

life was about to become because it was going to be so convenient for her to get

everything that she needed for her kids, for herself, if only she could live there.

I just had this idea, oh, we should live in the mall.

Live at the mall, like, it seemed like a very absurd fantasy and a great way to

plow through all of the negativity that had been built up for years in the loss of

our homes and the homes of, like, hundreds of people.

And so Adriana and Andrew and Jay and myself decided

that we would go live there for at least one week.

It was more of a game of survival.

Who was going to get kicked out from security and who was going to last the longest?

I think we were making bets about it.

I definitely thought that I was going to live there the longest.

I think my mind, I was like, oh, we need to document.

And I'm like, oh, we need a sketchbook.

And Mike's instinct on the document was like, all right, we all need to have a

point and shoot camera and be able to do video.

We had a little camera called a Pentax Optio S4i.

It is incredibly low res and the audio is terrible.

It's not designed for video.

Interestingly, it fit inside an Altoids can.

In my hand, that camera disappears, which meant that

I could walk through the mall with my arm like this.

That sounds silly, but I would forget it was there.

It was a fair bit of the food court.

It was trying on clothes.

You know, funny kind of teenage mall hang existence.

We ate all the leftover food at the food court.

We saw like almost every movie at the movie theater, which was awesome.

But as the sun set, we started to internalize the

dilemma we put ourselves in, which is we have no plan.

Where are we going to sleep?

Jay and Andrew found a four foot by four foot column in the parking garage that had

an opening that they could sneak up inside of.

I was in a really small space, unable to stretch out.

I believe I slept in my jacket with my knees kind of curled up to my chest.

I've been camping in some way, shape or form since I was

a small kid and I've had a lot of miserable nights out.

And this is in the pantheon of worst.

The place that Adriana and I find is based on my memory of the mall's construction.

When the mall was being built, I saw a space that

I could not figure out what it would be used for.

It was a nowhere space and I saw them store construction materials on it.

And I just sort of made a mental note about it.

I proposed that perhaps the nowhere space, as

it were, would give us shelter for the night.

And we went looking for that anomaly in the architecture and

we snuck ourselves in there and we took out our flashlights.

And we kept poking around and it struck me that the nowhere space, as it were,

must be up here somewhere.

And we were able to push ourselves up I-beams.

And there it was.

And it was safe and secure.

We're completely off the radar.

We weren't even entirely sure where we were in the mall.

But there was... the debris of construction was still there.

You know, four years later after the mall had opened, it was dirty.

It was truly abandoned.

And we were like, oh, this is great!

Mike had been like, come see the space I found.

And so, like, we all went down and into the bowels

and saw the, like, cavern that he had found.

Looking around at all the clues, it's like, no

one's been in here since they built the mall.

It started the conversation immediately about, like, wait, this is a lot of space.

Maybe we have a responsibility to do something with it.

It was sort of agreed pretty quickly that the couch was the most important thing.

Any time I went to a hearing at City Hall for a new real estate development,

this term of underutilized space kept coming up.

It was almost like it was a moral obligation on the part of the developers

to tap into this underutilized space.

It was almost like a crime.

We must extend our progress, and it must fill in every gap and crevice in the city

until there's a seamless development.

And so this was, like, a funny way of, like, itching back at that of,

like, well, we found some space.

We need to develop this underutilized space.

And I remember having this funny, jokey conversation about being micro-developers.

You know, that seemed really funny to us, that we

would become developers, but just for 750 square feet.

We put a bunch of ideas in the table, some of them were absolutely ridiculous,

you know, even about opening up our own store, or like, how would anybody visit it?

And we're like, we can just build a condominium, like, right here.

And, like, the couch is the thing that sort of made it a home immediately.

Providence had one time been one of the wealthiest cities in the United States.

And after World War II, an inexorable decline began to happen.

Providence seemed little more than a parking

lot by day and an abandoned city by night.

Serious decline soon created an uninviting, neglected environment.

It wasn't until in the mid-1980s, late 1980s, that the idea of a mall became

the centerpiece of the whole Providence renaissance.

You wanted retail to come back.

You wanted performing and visual arts.

You wanted all the things that Providence had been known for.

All of those things that would make Providence a destination

and not just a drive-through to another major city.

The Providence Place Mall was considered to be a major

new engine to help the revitalization effort take place.

The city had began to lose its retailing sales to the surrounding suburban areas.

But the mall did not happen overnight.

It took years and multiple administrations in order for this to occur.

It was a major building.

While the mall was being built, I really

started to internalize its impact on the city.

Because all of a sudden, I literally couldn't see the city anymore.

Look at this giant...

Look at this thing.

It's totally overpowering.

Looks like something out of a science fiction movie.

You've got the state house.

You can't even see it anymore.

They practically buried it.

I mean, it was no small task to move the rivers and to move the railroad tracks.

But I think it began to show that things were happening.

I remember the preview event, and everybody coming from all parts of New England.

It wasn't even just Rhode Island.

This is a large mall. Am I correct?

Oh, definitely.

You know, three and a half million square feet.

You don't get this type of mall in any city and everything.

It's very unique.

It makes this a destination city.

So having this big mall that represented a big investment, it was kind of like a new

face for Providence.

I think that was more probably something that was aligned with what politicians

wanted, but not necessarily for the communities, especially the adjacent communities.

We all hated the mall when it went up, right?

Nobody wanted that to happen.

It was infuriating.

Instead of putting the money into downtown in general and supporting the businesses

that were already here, they built that monstrosity.

We hated it.

And then as they started to sort of shore up the side facing our neighborhood,

I realized like, wait, there's no entrances for us.

This whole thing faces the east side.

It wasn't designed to be used by the people from this neighborhood.

In a way, it's like drawing a boundary in between the premium Providence and then

just like, you know, the unattractive, kind of historically excluded Providence.

By the time the mall opened, there was a sense that more changes were coming our way.

And there was a sense of impending doom.

Even before the Providence Place Mall is complete,

developers are getting ready to build Providence Marketplace.

Even while scaffolding still scales the Providence

Place Mall, another huge project is in the works.

The Providence Place Mall opened August of 1999.

And shortly after, a developer came to the mills spaces that we were living in and

put a proposal out that perhaps the best way to serve this neighborhood was to

knock down every single mill in a 13-acre area and

replace it with a strip mall and a supermarket.

So one of those buildings they wanted to knock down was Fort Thunder.

So behind the mall, we see the skeleton of the Industrial Revolution.

It is mill building after mill building.

And in the middle of all this mill building mess is called Eagle Square.

And in the heart of Eagle Square was a place called Fort Thunder.

And I was very fortunate to live there for a couple of years.

Well, Fort Thunder was a mill space.

It lasted, I think, from 95 to like 2001.

It started out with four of us renting this space.

My band, Lighting Bold, needed a place of practice and we wanted to have shows.

The history of that area, the history of Olneyville, is a

really specific history that you'll see throughout New England.

There were these factories.

People would live in the neighborhoods.

And then when the manufacturing sector was destroyed in the United States,

it destroyed these neighborhoods.

So if you were going to Fort Thunder for the first time, it was scary.

It was sort of like this secret playhouse for a while.

They just wanted to have fun.

They wanted to create.

They wanted to have their own world there.

You know, museums were like crypts, graveyards for art.

And our house was like a living art creature that we lived within.

I think it was like emboldening in a way to have this kind of like wild,

untamed space.

Just like living this really loud, literally like very loud.

So living at Fort Thunder is that sense of no routine, but a great sense of purpose.

And then, you know, within the year of that super heyday, a developer came in.

People started getting kicked out, and the city just started looking at that area.

These developers saw a great opportunity for themselves, because they knew that

they could buy these buildings and knock them down.

Coming back July 2nd, the joint better be empty.

Make sure you're out of here and that the joint's empty.

I'm not fucking around.

The developer was just looking at it as if it was any

old parcel that could become a suburban strip mall.

I mean, it's just an algorithm.

And they're like, oh, there's room for a supermarket

here, because the property value is so cheap.

All we have to do is just knock down all these buildings.

There was no outreach to the community to talk about, like,

rent control and how under-resourced the community was.

It's okay, like, change happens.

Like, there's nothing inherently wrong or evil about it.

But there was no effort to bring people along.

And I think that, in a way, Fort Thunder was like the first strike.

And I think the real estate developers were just