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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.
WPRO-FM, Providence.
It's 11:00 with the G-Man,
rolling through 10 hits in a row,
the most music every hour.
♪ 92, 92 PRO FM ♪
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 gonna get kicked out from security
and who was gonna last the longest.
And I think we were making bets about it.
I definitely thought that I was gonna
live there the longest.
I think, in 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.
It 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, a 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'd put ourselves in, which is we have no plan.
Where are we gonna 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 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 on the table,
some of them absolutely ridiculous, you know,
even about opening up our own store.
We're like, "How would anybody visit it?"
And we're like, "We can just build a condominium,
like right here."
PlayStation.
And, like, the couch,
is the thing that sort of made it a home immediately.
Providence had at one time
been one of the wealthiest cities in the United States,
and after World War II,
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 this 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.
It looks like something out of a science fiction movie.
You got the statehouse, 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, 3.5 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 them all 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 a 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 Lightning Bolt needed a place to practice
and we wanted to have shows.
The history of that area,
the history of, 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 in Fort Thunder
is that sense of no routine,
but a great sense of purpose.
And then, you know,
within a 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.
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.
They're like, "Oh, there's room for a supermarket here
because the property value is so cheap.
All we have to do is 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.
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 starting to understand
that there was so much to exploit.
When the Eagle Square fiasco was unfolding,
the mall becomes this sort of cultural enemy.
It becomes a sort of ogre in the cave
that the townsfolks are afraid of.
They're not sure how big it is,
but they just know it's nasty.
And so that tension just boils over
as soon as an actual person comes in and says,
"I'm gonna knock down your home."
People being evicted, people losing their spaces,
people getting kicked out, people getting priced out
was just sort of something kind of happening.
The mall comes, totally remakes your neighborhood,
you adjust.
It doesn't adjust to you. You adjust to it.
And it was impossible
to not see the apartment project through that lens.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Thanks.
All right.
By this stage, the group of people
invited into the space had grown from four to eight,
and occasionally a few of us would sleep there.
But for the most part it was a fantastic place
to just meet and hang out.
The mall project, I think,
it emerged fairly organically.
The main person who really started the project
and who had the initial idea was Mike.
It wasn't as though Mike sat down and was like,
"I got to assemble a supergroup of people
in order to, like, create this artists collective
that will be a public-facing thing."
As with other projects that Mike has done,
he wanted to involve the people
who are in his life in it.
He wanted to make it a group project.
Sort of notion of consistency.
Michael was the thread that connected everybody.
A lot of folks he met through his time teaching,
and so they were students,
former students of his.
He and Adriana were married,
and then the two of us were in this grad program together.
Everyone was sort of very driven,
but we were all real sort of nerdy and weird.
That group felt really at home.
We all felt really fun together.
It just sounds like such a magic thing
to take a space from the mall.
Like, it seems like you shouldn't be able
to pull it off.
So trying to pull it off,
it feels like somebody needs to do it.
This was our group project
and it was like a secret, right?
And it was a secret pact.
One, two, three.
The big rule was to not bring people from outside.
So it was intended to be
a fairly exclusive club, I suppose.
So there's this core team of eight artists.
That is essentially the brain trust for the creation of it
and the curation of it
and the knowledge of the mall space.
You know, there's art that you see and you enjoy
and it entertains you.
And then there's art that impacts you.
And that's the kind of piece this was.
It had an impact that was both emotional and psychological
and is not easily described, which my favorite kind of art.
My friend was like, "Hey, you got to go see this.
There's like underneath the train tracks,
there's actually like this, like,
weird, creepy art exhibit that, like,
felt like it was a mystery who made it."
So I actually had no idea at the time
anything about why it was there.
You opened up a hatch and climbed down into--
was like a sewer grate, basically.
And then kind of traverse these few tunnels,
and then it opened up into a bigger open space,
super wet, dank.
But then there were these sculptures of human bodies
suspended all throughout the space,
and you could walk through and sort of interact with them
on your own terms.
There's no signage.
There's nobody telling you anything
about what you're experiencing.
There's one day when I spent
a really long time looking for it,
and I couldn't figure out how to get into it,
but I never-- and I never figured it out.
I think you had to, like, go between the train tracks.
I'm not even sure, actually, where the entrance
to the tunnel was now.
I think that the body tunnel,
you could call it a stunt,
you could call it an installation art piece.
What makes it art for me is that it asks me
to imagine a setting for art
that was not the setting
that I had been told art happened in.
I'm not sure when I put two and two together
that it was Mike's piece.
I think that probably came much later.
But, like, I just remember, you know, that was like
one of my favorite secret spots
in Providence to take people.
And I think Michael was very discreet about it.
I don't think he was promoting it.
Him finding that tunnel was, I think, an offshoot
of just like all of us exploring
just whatever we could find.
But where we were mostly just exploring stuff,
Michael was sort of putting his artistic practice,
like, into those spaces,
like, putting things in the spaces
and messing around with the spaces.
He's always been an inspiration.
I went to the RISD summer program,
and Mike was my drawing teacher.
He did something very rare and very unusual,
which was that he expected you
to have a genuine personal connection
to the work that you made.
It was a way of living,
not some sort of produced object that can be seen,
you know, in a museum or something like that.
Most of us-- myself certainly--
came to that program thinking
art is a thing you do on paper.
And Mike exploded our understanding
of what art is or could be.
So it was the start of a decade of life
that has had a massive impact on me, yeah.
Mike was like a super involved teacher,
like, different than any teacher I had had
up until that point, for sure.
He kind of approached art in a different way, definitely,
than anything like I'd been exposed to before,
where it was kind of like,
what do you actually want to make and why?
What Michael was able to introduce to me,
which was so powerful at that age,
was that I could, uh--
I could actually just look inside myself
and find things that were worth sharing.
So, yes, like that--
that class with Mike helped to galvanize me
to find my way to publicly engaged work.
For Mike, the difference between
art and life is very hard to discern.
Art and life are two very porous things for him.
And so he thinks of art projects
as being sort of deeply incorporated into his life.
And that's something you probably will hear
from other people,
this "life as art, art as life" thing.
And that's something that, like, as a young person,
it was super impactful to see somebody
living in a way that felt like all of it was the art.
The secret apartment was the art,
the teaching was the art.
The interacting with other people was the art.
All the stuff together is what makes life meaningful.
And I think that's like
something I've been trying to do
since I was a teenager.
So the secret apartment,
nestled down in here,
kind of floating above the train tracks,
kind of tucked in between the back side
of all the stores.
We had a couple different ways of getting in.
Our exterior entrance was basically right alongside
the train tracks.
There was a gap in between a couple of walls
that would allow you to get into
the bowels of the building, pretty much,
and we were able to shimmy along some walls
to get access to where the space was.
Additionally, we could get into
the same zone of the mall where the secret apartment was
basically from any emergency exit door
on this side of the building.
That would lead you
into a serpentine bunch of staircases and hallways.
Somewhere along that serpentine path,
there were a couple different ways
we could access the secret apartment.
Because this building is made of
a bunch of really odd shapes--
you can see like the way that the angle follows the river
and the way that that curve follows the highway.
The building has a bunch of weird intersecting shapes.
So I think the space that we discovered
was really a negative space
in between two planes of the building,
which created sort of a triangle
in between two parts of the building,
which is where the secret apartment was.
The food court is this sort of third level up here.
And the bathrooms--
I think our most frequently used bathroom
was on the first floor,
sort of like the main retail drag of the mall.
There were bathrooms on each floor.
I feel like we used the ones on the first floor the most
because they were closest to the entrance.
So the secret apartment being down in here,
we can have a look at it by
taking this roof off and...
Can pull that out.
So there's Andrew, James, Jay,
myself, Emily, Greta, Adriana, and Michael
all hanging out in the space together.
So additionally, just for fun, hidden in here
is the Optio S5i.
Amazingly it still works.
Just needed a charge of the battery.
I can probably sneak a little
picture of the apartment or two if it'll focus.
Once we wanted to really make this
an apartment that was ours,
as opposed to just a room in the mall,
we decided we needed to make it
so we had access to it
without having other people have access to it.
So the apartment in the mall had this big gaping space
that looked down into a storage area.
You would come up this steep metal staircase
and you would just be looking into the apartment.
So there was a real necessity to build a wall there.
Building a wall was going to be the thing
that made it even more invisible, in the sense that,
like, another cinder-block wall with another door
just becomes another thing
that if anyone walks through the space
they're not gonna bat an eye at.
Obviously, the main feat of that whole thing
was just moving that many cinder blocks.
I think, you know, we calculated
it was like, you know,
4,500 or 5,000 pounds of cinder blocks.
So that was, you know, a couple of tons.
In regards to security,
we were thinking about it all the time.
They're a constant presence in our mind.
But it's important to emphasize
that there's no-- no part of me
that has any interest in duping security.
I don't-- I don't feel any thrill in that.
They have a job to do. I respect that job.
I also just want to do my job.
There was no way to prepare for it.
Like, we didn't know what circumstances
would trigger us being caught.
We had no idea who would approach us or, uh,
and what level of hostility it would be.
We just would be ready to explain ourselves
in whatever moment unfolded.
Now, I have, up until that point,
a career in explaining myself.
My work as an artist
means that I am constantly explaining my presence
to police officers, to city officials.
It is a space I feel very comfortable in.
You know, we were on a multileg journey
coming from Home Depot.
You know, we got these cinder blocks at Home Depot,
and now we're going to the mall.
So, yeah, it's, uh, kind of amazing.
I told this security guard
that we had gone to Home Depot,
filled the car with cinder blocks,
come to the mall, had done some shopping,
and came back to a car that could not move.
So we had arranged to move the cinder blocks
down the stairwell to an awaiting friend's truck,
and he let us on our way.
And I know that has a lot to do with just who we were.
I'm certain, looking back on it,
that we had like a shield of white privilege around us.
Black and brown people in the same space
doing illegal things, or doing even not illegal things,
are not treated that way and would not be treated
with the same deference as we were.
My fear of the police is not the same.
I'm not worried about risk to my body and life.
You know, simultaneously to this,
I was working with Mike on Tape Art,
uh, which is Mike's sort of organization
that will go around and do public murals,
do temporary public murals made out of masking tape.
One of the more notable ones was going
to Hasbro Children's Hospital and making murals there.
I first became aware of Tape Art
and heard about Michael
through probably some artist friends,
that there was some guy out there
who was using tape and drawing on the wall.
And I thought, "I don't know. This is...
Sounds quirky and kooky, and what does he do?
I mean, how is this gonna appeal to kids?"
So I had a lot of questions.
Tape art is a unique process.
I don't know any other artists, frankly,
who are doing tape art.
Michael was the first one I met,
and I've never met anybody since.
I think I was fascinated by the uniqueness.
So the more I watched him, the more I realized that,
you know, he was truly a master.
The patients' immediate reaction is,
first of all, they're very open to something new.
And it was, again, a little odd.
It wasn't somebody coming in with drawing paper
and a brush or crayons.
It was somebody coming in with five rolls of blue tape
on his arm and swinging them around.
And then the kid would often say,
"Oh, you know, what's going on?
What are you gonna do with that tape?"
And Michael would take it from there.
Michael did have a crew of people.
You know, what they drew,
the mice and the horses and the mermaids,
it was that they were able to
engage the child in conversation about,
"What do you want on your wall?"
so that when Michael and his team walked into the room,
he didn't come in with an idea of what he was gonna do.
He let the child lead him.
And when possible, of course, if the patient was mobile,
they'd engage the patient in actually helping him
to create the mural.
But now the patient is involved
in a creative activity
and has a responsibility to seeing
what's happening on the wall of his room
and changing his environment, having a sense of control.
So I think that the patient just got lost.
Could be for 15 minutes and it could have been,
you know, for a couple of hours.
Michael was coming in at least once a week,
and he was one of the first people that I hired.
So I would say he was, yeah,
he was here for at least 15 years.
Funding was tough, but free lunch was provided.
If they came in the morning, they could stay for lunch.
If they came in the afternoon, they could come early
and we always provided a free lunch for them.
And I think they were pretty grateful for that
because I don't think many of them--
I don't think they ate during the day.
I think one of the first questions kids and staff
and families always asked,
"What's gonna happen to this mural now
that's on the wall?"
And Michael always made it very clear
that there was an impermanence,
and it was really for the here and now.
He said, you know, "We'll create a new one tomorrow,
think of something new that we could do."
So Michael had an interesting beginning.
Because his father was in the Marine Corps,
we lived in eight different places
before he was seven years old.
I think it made him very open-minded.
I think Michael takes in all kinds of people,
all kinds of social situations.
So, basically, I think that's what's made him
someone who's at home anywhere.
So let's get you this one
and this one, the blue one.
Basically it's like a form of like, of...
- Temporary graffiti. - Temporary graffiti.
And it gives you a lot of freedom.
So I was brought up in a military family.
Both my parents were in the military
and their parents were in the military,
and I believe their parents were in the military.
So my brother and I were the first ones to sort of, uh,
break that lineage.
In Mike's case, um, hmm...
I don't want to speak for him, but it just was never--
never seemed like it would be a good fit for him.
He was far too creative growing up,
and I think a military career would have restricted
his level of creativity that just abounded.
No words or letters are the only rule.
Good luck. Let's work on that together.
Make sure you got that one technique down.
Don't pull it. Just let it hang.
And very gently...
That looks really good.
- Okay. - Yeah. Keep going, keep going.
Michael as a person is all about
involving people
in a collaborative process of art.
And I've seen that in a lot of cases
that he's just a very selfless person.
And that is something really--
yeah, that is something really special about Michael, yeah.
So the cynic might say that you're not gonna make
the world a better place with your art,
but, like, maybe you're not gonna make
the entire world a little better,
but maybe you'll make one person's life better
and then somebody else's life better.
It becomes the "ripples in the pond" effect.
So the main priorities in my career
have always been making art and teaching art,
and trying to use that art to have positive impacts
on other people's lives.
There's not a lot of money in that.
I work at a nonprofit museum.
Michael is an artist.
We are not swimming in money, either of us.
And Michael does...
He takes it...
Sometimes he doesn't take it seriously,
and I've gotten upset.
Like, he will text me pictures of his bank account
that has 41 cents, and he thinks that's funny.
And I see the text, and I'm like, "This is not funny."
And I've had to talk to him about like,
"Could you please not send me this
when you have like a dollar?"
Like, this doesn't make me laugh, personally.
After we had a little run-in with security,
that encounter forced us to rethink
how we're bringing the cinder blocks in.
And we're like, well, we have a private entrance.
So the entrance we had used
to initially discover the space
in the first place became the way
that we'd bring the cinder blocks in.
So at the same time the core group of eight of us
were working in the apartment in the mall,
we also took a trip collectively
to go to Oklahoma City for the 10th anniversary
of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing.
Mike was there doing tape art in Oklahoma City
when that happened and made a mural.
I think he was the only nonmedical personnel
allowed in the home base
and made a mural for the, basically,
the sole audience of the first responders.
Folks seem to like the idea of it being
an optimism mural, that--
more about individuals being able to have
freedom and flight,
and maybe through the help of other people
they can achieve that.
So we planned a trip back to OKC,
like on the anniversary of the bombing
to kind of do more artwork with the community.
The group of us spent a full week there working
at like a memorial site and doing projects in schools,
basically like a little elite strike force team
of empathetic artists.
I don't think that artists are obliged to go out
and do good works,
or to try to pretend that making art
has to sort of like save the world or feed the children,
or do any kind of like, you know,
nice crunchy thing that people might want.
But if you can and if there's an opportunity, why not?
You have the chance to use a skill
that you have to do something good.
And also, you know, I do really believe that
art and aesthetic experience are good in and of themselves,
that they're not means to anything
but that they make life better.
It's funny.
I imagine when people heard like the one snippet of
"there was an apartment in the mall,"
it's not the first thing that they think people would be
using it for is
kind of planning and discussing things
around these big public art projects that we were doing.
The central project in our life
was the September 11th memorial.
It was all-consuming.
We had, uh, made the decision
to draw 500 portraits, life-size,
simple silhouettes, of every fireman
and every airline passenger
that passed away at the World Trade Center.
Okay.
Saracini.
Number 38, heart one. He's here.
We're gonna walk to the other side of this square right here
and put a figure.
Sir Russell is gonna be about a block that direction.
Mike had drawn these four large hearts
over the island of Manhattan,
and we would basically go down to New York,
we'd follow that path and just find locations on that to try
and do a drawing of a figure.
And we'd document it
and then this, like, Web memorial, we'd go back
and make sort of like a Web page
showcasing that documentation.
Portraits of people who died on September 11th
along the path of four hearts.
So, like walking those paths and drawing,
I think, every block, a person.
And those were all temporary drawings.
You know, you're in public,
you're in the streets of Manhattan,
you're trying to go quick.
We almost never had permission to make the work.
So you're trying to not get busted.
If you got busted, you could just remove the mural.
The tape is impermanent,
but as far as tape art goes, kind of intense scenario.
You're trying to honor the circumstance,
the people you're representing,
and the seriousness of it all.
But you're also interacting with people in the public
who are curious to know what you're doing
or if it's illegal.
Yeah, it was like a great drawing challenge.
- See these four hearts here? - Yeah.
These four hearts span the entirety of Manhattan.
- One, two three, four. - Yep.
And right now we are working on heart one.
So we're right now right about here.
And these hearts, if you were to connect the dots
between all of these figures that we're drawing,
you would be drawing out
these fantastically large hearts.
Wow.
We would hop in the car, in Mike's Toyota,
and drive to New York to do drawings
over the course of a couple of days
with a goal some section of a heart,
and then, with the documentation,
we would head back to Providence,
where we would compile the next set of collages.
And then once a good window
presented itself to head back to New York,
we'd hop back in the car and get to it.
It took a long time. Uh, years.
This project, when it started,
we thought maybe two, three years,
stretched out to five years.
All of these efforts pretty much, like,
was all volunteer.
The Hope Project was completely self-funded.
I mean, I know that Mike's-- every bit of money
that he made went directly back
into paying for the Hope Project.
Mostly the paying for it was,
you know, all of our labor was completely volunteer.
But for me, just thinking about
meaningful things I've done in my life,
that's something I look at as really,
truly meaningful artwork.
I'm not sure, but the project that we made,
uh, to be honest, I don't even know how it exists now.
I'm not sure if it even exists to this day.
The apartment was the side project to the other stuff.
The Hope Project, Oklahoma City projects,
the work at the hospital,
that was, I believe, our focus as a team.
You know, the mall project felt like a way for us
to have maybe more fun than thinking about tragedy,
which for a couple of years we were, like,
really thinking about tragedy all the time.
Once you have your own wall,
then you get your own door,
and then you have your own lock,
and then you get your own key.
So our whole team had a key
to an apartment in the mall.
So what I didn't realize
when I was initially looking at these photos--
This step-down here that's happening
in the cinder blocks,
I was like, "Weird."
Yeah, poor craftsmanship.
- Because you had built it. - Right.
- Ahh. - Right.
But that brings like a certain degree of charm.
So with the couch, you can tell it's a pretty big couch
from the amount of people that are fitting on it.
Sectional.
- Oh, it's a sectional. - Yeah.
Can you draw for me, roughly, like, the floor plan
or just the orientation of walls and stuff as you...
So if this is our front door, this is our back door.
- Whoa. - We had a couch here.
We had our entertainment system
on a little tiny table with a TV.
And there was a dresser out here.
Rugs, lamps.
You didn't have outlets, did you?
No, but we had the extension cord here, down...
- Oh, my God. - ...one story into over here.
The door is there. The couch is basically here.
Little table was basically here.
You walk to that,
and that puts the china cabinet here.
Getting it to look right-- like this is too distressed.
No, that's not-- that's not-- that's brick.
- That's closer. - Closer.
That's it. That's what it looked like.
Yeah, with the folks from Providence
who are helping on this project,
um, it was pretty easy for me
to rope them in because I just said,
"Remember that time those people lived at the mall?
How would you like to rebuild that room?"
You know, we're working with a tight budget,
but everyone's really excited about the project,
so we're doing the best we can.
I think everyone was sort of willing to pitch in
and just being a little scrappier.
There's a lot of free items that we're running around
and picking up.
We're basically doing what these guys did.
You know, the way that they were finding their furniture
was oftentimes at Salvation Army
or things that they were finding
on the side of the road,
and we're doing a sort of expedited version of that.
I think more than anything, I want Michael
and Adriana and Andrew and Colin
and whoever else to walk into the space
knowing that it's just a re-creation for a documentary,
but having it sort of evoke the memory of the space.
So I was hired at Pottery Barn
to do, uh, shipping/receiving.
The company was trying to promote shadow boxes,
so they wanted to do a workshop, so I did it.
So when they came in, they were really excited and jovial
and they were like, "We're into this."
They sort of explained who they were,
what kind of art they made,
that they were from Eagle Square
and that they got kicked out.
I had been to Eagle Square,
so I knew kind of the situation.
You know, we had this connection going.
And then they started to tell me,
you know, slowly it kind of leaked out.
It was pretty clear from the beginning
that they wanted to know more information about the mall,
and I was their inside about that.
So after they left, you know, of course,
there were all the questions from the other employees,
you know, "What's this about?"
And I just told them it was an art project.
Here we go. So this is our home.
This door also has a lock, just like our door did.
And, um, it's locked, so I can't go in the apartment.
This is the weird thing about the mall apartment
is that it makes you feel really relaxed.
It's this paradox, right?
It's a little prisonlike,
because there's this cement wall
and there's no natural light,
and you could be discovered at any moment.
There's this weird sense of freedom
where no one's gonna bother you,
you're not gonna be late for anything.
It's just this really quiet refuge in a way.
You're on, like, the inside-out version
of a building that you're never supposed to experience.
Um, and so it's like being in the belly of a beast.
In some ways we had this raw black box.
It was a bit of a space station,
self-imposed prison cell.
There was no windows, there's no light.
And it was about this desire to cultivate it
and make it more human.
Uh...
Sleeping in the apartment was, I think, really cold usually.
And we had like some sleeping bags, at least in the winter.
Definitely really hot in the summer too.
And incredibly dark.
Slept on this couch a lot.
Probably the most--
for me, the most nights in a row
would have been four or five
or something like that, I think.
We had tried different, like, sleeping arrangements,
but I remember Mike and I
doing this on this couch a lot,
the head-to-foot sleeping.
And this hutch...
I was gonna look for it. It feels so real.
It definitely-- it had a real waffle maker
so we could make waffles in the mall apartment.
So I had this vision of staging
this set of domestic bliss--
gorgeous, very bourgeois, even within
the dusty, grimy cinder block of that apartment.
Oh, my gosh, the cinder block, yeah, it was, um...
It was, uh, dustier.
It was always giving off--
It was always generating kind of like
a fine mist of-- of cement.
So much of what the mall sells us
is this performance of a consumer lifestyle.
And so the mall apartment
was this opportunity to have this set, almost,
where we could play out the unrealistic
and unattainable fantasies of the mall.
And the joke would be, "You know what?
Oh, you love just beautifying things?
Like, so do we."
During the time that the apartment in the mall
was being built, I was married to Adriana
and she had a front-row seat to a lot of lunacy.
There was some part of me that knew
this was not a good relationship,
and then I was able to realize
that it was not the right thing for me.
Yeah.
This illustrates one of the core dilemmas
of, uh, driving yourself towards an art project
that you really deeply believe in,
because sometimes it's truly in the face of all reason.
Why are you spending all of that time there?
Why are you doing that September 11th project? Why?
There's no-- Where's the reward in any of this?
What's your end game? Valid questions.
At this time, the apartment is starting to transform
into something else.
It's evolving again.
It had started as a response
to development projects in our neighborhood,
and within a couple of years
it looks like a domestic space,
but it's completely isolated from the world.
And sometimes when you're in that space,
you felt like you were on the stage of a sitcom TV show.
And I think kind of because of that feeling,
we just stopped filming ourselves altogether.
And then we had had this break-in.
They were two guys, young guys,
maybe 20, 21, something like that,
who were new security guards at the mall.
I think they were just going through every door,
and they came upon the door
that they did not have the key to.
So they just kicked the door down.
So Colin and I enter into the apartment
to try to figure out what's happened.
Our door's been broken in.
But when we enter into the apartment,
we can quickly assess that someone else
has been spending time there, and it's not us.
And there's evidence of entertainment
dispersed throughout.
But things have also been stolen.
Our, uh, PlayStation, weirdly enough,
was the thing that was gone, and then there were some other
of our personal effects that were gone.
We had some framed pictures and stuff
to make it feel a little homier.
Those were the things that were gone.
I think they took the PlayStation
because it had all of our save dates
for the games we were playing on it,
so that's just a record of all the visits
in the last couple months.
And they took our photo album
because it had just photographs of us.
It was very clearly who lived in this apartment.
Busted. Job well done. Bravo.
We've been in this space for four years,
and there's this underlying dread
that we're gonna get caught at any time.
And after we were broken into, we just stopped
going to that space during the day altogether.
And then I screwed up.
I had a friend visiting from out of town,
and I thought to myself, "I'll bring her to see the space."
And I went during the day.
I disrespected our own rules, and it blew up in my face.
All right, this is our secret apartment.
Been slowly building this over the last four years.
Moving in pieces of furniture and slowly building it up
to try to make it a fully domestic space to live in.
Are you allowed to be here?
Technically, no. We've been doing it all on the sly.
And within a couple of days, the wood floors will be in,
and it'll be one step closer.
- How did you get this up here? - That is--
Yeah, so between the sound of the walkie-talkie
and seeing that doorknob turn,
everything just goes into slo-mo.
And it's one of those times when you can process
a lot of scenarios in a very short period of time.
One of the possibilities is just to get out of there.
Book it, grab your friend,
head towards the secret passage,
and... that's where you're in trouble,
because you're asking them to dive into a place
that's like pitch dark, full of ledges and I-beams.
They're probably not gonna make it.
Another idea that struck me was,
they were entering into my home,
so I should just invite them in as guests,
treat them like royalty,
and maybe they would treat me well in return?
Ah! Hello!
Gentlemen, it's good to see you.
Ah! Too long. You. You, sir.
But that probably wasn't gonna work.
Another possibility that went through my mind
is that this isn't security at all,
that maybe this is just a cool person
with a walkie-talkie on the other side of that door.
- Walkie-talkies. - Yes!
Radio Shack.
Sweet!
But after seeing those three guys step through that door
in their business suits, I knew it was over.
I remember stepping right up and saying, "Surprise!"
- Do you know who I am? - We know who you are.
You're gonna need to follow us.
Our other top local story on Eyewitness News at Noon--
This is an incredible tale.
A local artist has apparently had
some living space in the Providence Place Mall.
In all, eight artists were in and out of that loft area,
but there was one man who admitted that he lived there,
and now he's facing trespassing charges,
and he's also banned from the premises.
In a mall with 24-hour security,
Michael Townsend was able to build
a fully livable apartment,
and he used it for nearly four years.
Townsend was arrested and charged with trespassing.
A judge sentenced him to six months probation
and ordered him to pay court costs and restitution.
A spokesman for the mall said the hidden space
would be sealed up immediately.
Townsend's original charge...
Townsend has been barred
from coming to the mall permanently.
Townsend was released this morning,
spending just one night in jail.
His only regret is that it ended too soon.
In the next year, he planned on expanding the apartment
and building an extra bedroom,
a kitchen, and a bathroom, all with running water.
When asked if the apartment was a work of art
or just a place to live, Townsend told us that for him
there's no line between art and life.
Brian Crandall, NBC 10 News, Providence.
So I was told by representatives of the mall
that they took down our cinder-block wall
and then moved all the cinder blocks
to rebuild a new wall to block off the entrance
we had used to enter in all of those years.
As far as I know, no one's ever been in there again.
With our secret apartment in the mall,
there wasn't any sense of it being permanent.
We're just gonna keep building it
until we reached that crescendo moment
and then make it disappear.
So what is it? What is it?
Is it a work of art? Is it a social experiment?
Is it trespassing? Is it a prank?
It's maybe all of these things.
It was this idea of
reinventing everyday life
and making of everyday life
an artistic project.
It talks about gentrification.
It talks about, uh, capitalism
and, you know, everything being commodified.
It's the perfect site
to address issues of, like,
ownership of capital, of private versus public.
It was like this alternate universe
that's, like, within the real world.
It's a crossover between installation art
and performance art.
I think it was a combo of, like, mischief
and, like, snark.
It seemed like a big presentational show
because they don't like-- they don't like malls?
It felt like, blah, whatever.
I don't really get it, I will admit,
uh, which is-- Michael finds that hilarious.
Uh, you know, it's-- I-- I try to understand
why this was an art project and the deeper, um, messaging
he was trying to get across by occupying unoccupied space.
And, like, I've heard it, I've heard it,
but I just don't really get why it's art.
I'm not sure if it-- if it moves over
to the area of being artistic.
I think this is just his creative mind
trying to express itself in every possible way.
I've kept this key on my keychain the entire time.
Yep, this is the key.
Um, which used to have flames on it, but it doesn't anymore.
Well, um, it's here on my keychain.
Um, I have no idea if the door's still there,
so I sometimes refer to it as my key to nowhere.
Here is my key.
It's got, uh, what's left of an American flag
and an eagle on it.
You can kind of see, like, a little bit of the flames
left in there.
Uh, but pretty well worn. And that was the key.
Oh, yeah.