8 friends built an “apartment at the secret shopping center”, were not taken for 4 years

In the early 2000s, Adriana Valdez Young heard radio advertising for the brand new Providence Place shopping center, a development that then developed to attract luxury buyers to the capital of Rhode Island.

In the announcement, a woman out of breath made the shopping center panting, exclaiming that she wanted to be able to live there because she had everything she could need.

“I just had this idea: oh, we should live in the shopping center,” said Valdez Young, an artist, in a new documentary.

This idea has become a four -year adventure led by Valdez Young and her husband Michael Townsend then, also an artist. Slowly, their group of friends moved concrete blocks, a sofa, a dining table, carpets, and a PlayStation console in a corridor hidden at the bottom of the shopping center labyrinth System of underground corridors and emergency exits.

The refuge – and the art that the group has created there over four years – is documented in the latest film by director Jeremy Workman, “Secret Mall Apartment”, now screened in Providence and New York. The film will have a wider release in Los Angeles and additional cities in April.

Local artists saw the secret apartment as a protest against a city in changing

In the 1980s and 1990s, city officials were determined to revitalize the city center of Providence to make it a destination, and not just a stop on other cities like New York and Boston.

Providence Place Mall has been designed to be an economic engine, with high -end department stores like Lord & Taylor and Nordstrom and its own cinema.

When the shopping center finally opened in 1999, it prompted real estate developers to reconsider the construction of other new projects in the surrounding areas. A target was the abandoned factory nearby known as Fort Thunder, which served as a performance space, play houses and artists.

Fort Thunder was demolished to make way for a shopping center and the planned grocery store, which has angry the members of the creative community who felt vapor by the process.

“There was no effort to bring people,” said Valdez Young in the documentary.

The apartment was peaceful and felt like a TV

Providence Place Mall has a unique design. With a river crossing the center and the rounded edges to accommodate the interstate I-95 nearby, its strange floor plan has created the perfect hidden alcove.

“The building has a lot of strange interesting shapes. The space we discovered was really a negative space between two building planes,” said Colin Bliss, one of the artists who helped build the apartment in the film.

The group of friends accessed the secret apartment in two ways. First of all, they could sparkle between open spaces in a stairwell in the parking lot.

Second, they could arrive at their hiding place from inside the shopping center through a series of emergency outings and hidden corridors. Sequences of the film show that the group lets the exit alarms go up until they finally sneak while sneaking objects in space.

Over the years, the group has bought an ancient porcelain cabinet, a sectional sofa, a glass dining table and other domestic goods in the Salvation Army and has made them in Providence Place. Sometimes they made a purchase from the catering area so that they had a receipt in case they are arrested.

The apartment even had its own waffle maker.

“It made you feel really relaxed,” said Valdez Young in the documentary. “It’s a bit like a prison, because there is this cement wall and no natural light, and you could be discovered at any time. There was this strange sense of freedom.”

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The shopping guards of the shopping center finally foiled the artists

The group mainly used the apartment as a meeting space to reflect and plan various artistic projects, including personalized facilities in children’s hospitals and a New York portrait project honoring the victims of September 11.

They may have slept overnight there, but many artists said in the film that they also had other houses at the time.

After four years, the group began to suspect the staff of the shopping center on them. Various articles in the apartment, such as photo albums and the PlayStation console, have disappeared.

The group thought that the security agents had found the apartment and used it as their own meeting when the artists were not there. They decided to visit the apartment after the hours to avoid being caught.

One day, Townsend broke the rule because he wanted to show the refuge to a friend who visited from the outside of the city. During their visit, security intervened and caught Townsend and his friend. It was prohibited from the life shopping center and the apartment was permanently sealed.

The ban, however, was apparently lifted. Townsend recently attended projections of the documentary “Secret Mall Apartment” in Providence Place itself, according to the local newspaper The Providence Journal.