In 2003, eight artists discovered an overlooked space hidden inside Providence Place, a massive shopping mall in Rhode Island. Instead of leaving it untouched, they transformed the roughly 750-square-foot area into a secret apartment complete with furniture, entertainment and a place to sleep. For four years, they quietly used the hidden space while shoppers moved through the mall around them, turning an unusual experiment into one of the strangest stories in modern American art.
They Lost Their Old Creative Space and Found Something Unexpected
The story began with a changing Providence. Michael Townsend and his friends were part of a local artistic community that had developed around Fort Thunder, an unconventional warehouse space where artists, musicians and other creatives could work and live. As redevelopment transformed the area, that community lost its home. Providence was changing, and spaces that had once been available to artists were increasingly being replaced by commercial development.
Then there was Providence Place, a huge shopping mall that had opened in 1999. To the artists, the mall represented many of the changes taking place around them. It was a place designed primarily for shopping and consumption, while the creative community they had known was disappearing.
The irony was hard to miss. They had lost a place where artists could build their own community, while a massive commercial complex had taken shape nearby with enormous amounts of space inside it.
Then an advertisement gave Townsend and his friends an unusual idea. The commercial presented the mall as a place where people could find almost everything they needed. The artists jokingly wondered what would happen if they actually tried to live there.
What began as a challenge to spend a week inside the mall would soon become something much more ambitious.
They Found a Hidden 750-Square-Foot Space
While exploring the mall, Townsend remembered an unfinished area he had noticed during construction. Hidden inside the structure was a roughly 750-square-foot space that was not being used as a normal retail or public area.
For most people, it would have looked like an inconvenient and unfinished part of a massive building.
For Townsend and his friends, it looked like an opportunity.
The group decided to transform the forgotten space into their own secret home. The project was initially connected to their plan to spend an entire week inside the mall, but once they realized how much space they had found, the experiment became far more serious. They began imagining what it would look like if they actually made the place livable.
The location was particularly useful because it was hidden deep inside the structure. It was not somewhere ordinary shoppers would casually wander into, which gave the artists an extraordinary advantage.
They didn’t have to hide an apartment in plain sight. They simply had to make sure nobody discovered the space behind the walls.
Want to see how eight artists turned an overlooked space inside a shopping mall into a secret home? Watch the trailer to get a glimpse inside their unusual four-year experiment and the story behind Secret Mall Apartment.
They Turned an Empty Space Into a Real Apartment
The transformation was far more elaborate than a few people sleeping on a concrete floor.
The artists brought in a sectional sofa, a loveseat, tables, chairs, lamps, rugs, artwork, a television, a bed and other household items. They even had a waffle maker and a PlayStation 2. The result looked less like an abandoned corner of a parking structure and more like a strange, unfinished apartment hidden inside a commercial complex.
They also built a cinder-block wall and installed an ordinary-looking utility door to make the space difficult to notice from outside. According to contemporary accounts, the group hauled large quantities of construction material through the mall to create their hidden enclosure.
Electricity was available, allowing them to power lights and electronics, but the apartment was far from a conventional home. There was no running water or functioning bathroom inside the space. When they needed water or a restroom, they used facilities elsewhere in the mall.
That limitation did not stop them.
The apartment became a place where they could sleep, eat, relax, play games, talk and work on creative projects. They had effectively created a tiny private world inside one of the busiest public spaces in Providence.
They Lived There in Secret for Four Years
The most astonishing part of the story is how long the arrangement lasted.
The eight artists used the apartment from 2003 until 2007. They did not necessarily live there continuously or all at the same time. Instead, members of the group used the space for periods of time, sometimes staying for weeks while documenting their unusual life inside the mall.
They also documented what they were doing with a small digital camera. Much of the footage was ordinary: people sitting around, talking, eating and spending time together. But that mundane quality is precisely what makes the material fascinating.
It shows that the apartment gradually became more than a prank.
It became a genuine social space.
The artists were not simply trying to prove that they could sleep inside a mall. They had created a clubhouse where they could spend time together away from the conventional structures of work, housing and commercial life.
In a strange way, the mall became their neighborhood. They could go shopping downstairs, eat in the food court, visit stores and watch movies, then return to their hidden apartment without ever leaving the building. The concept was almost absurdly convenient. And that absurdity was part of the point.
The Secret Was Finally Discovered
After approximately four years, the experiment finally came to an end.
Mall security discovered the hidden apartment in 2007 after a visitor’s presence helped draw attention to the space. Townsend eventually took responsibility for the project and was charged with trespassing. He received probation and was banned from entering the mall.
The discovery immediately transformed the strange private experiment into a public story.
The secret apartment was no longer secret.
News reports described the unusual space, its furniture and the remarkable fact that eight people had managed to maintain it inside the mall for years. The apartment was eventually sealed, and the furnishings were removed.
For Townsend, the consequences were serious, but the story also gained an unexpected second life. What had started as a private project among a group of artists became a widely discussed example of unconventional art and urban rebellion.
The question was no longer simply how they had managed to get away with it. People began asking why they had done it in the first place.
Want to see the hidden apartment and discover how eight artists managed to live inside a shopping mall for four years? Watch the video to take a closer look at the secret space and the unusual story behind it.
It Was More Than Just a Strange Prank
The secret apartment can easily be dismissed as an elaborate prank. Eight artists found an empty room and decided to live inside a shopping mall. On the surface, it sounds like little more than a bizarre story from the early 2000s.
But the project had deeper roots.
For Townsend and his collaborators, the apartment was connected to questions about urban development, commercialization and the disappearance of creative spaces. Their former artistic community at Fort Thunder had been displaced as Providence changed, while the new mall represented the enormous commercial development taking place around them.
By occupying an unused part of the mall, they were effectively turning the logic of the building upside down.
The mall was designed for people to come inside, spend money and leave. They decided to come inside and stay.
The project also blurred the boundary between art and everyday life. The apartment functioned as a living space, a social clubhouse, an installation and a long-running performance. Even people who knew the story have disagreed about exactly what category it belongs to. It can be viewed as performance art, installation art, social experimentation, trespassing or simply an elaborate prank. Perhaps it was all of those things at once.
Years later, filmmaker Jeremy Workman turned the story into the documentary Secret Mall Apartment, bringing the eight artists back together to revisit what they had created. The film uses their original footage alongside new interviews to explore not only the strange apartment itself but also the ideas about community, commercial development and creative freedom that surrounded it.
The story has endured because the apartment was never really just about hiding from security. It was about taking a space that was supposed to serve commerce and turning it into something completely different.
For four years, eight artists secretly turned an overlooked corner of a busy shopping mall into a place they could call their own. What began as an unusual experiment became something far more meaningful—a reflection on creativity, community and the changing urban landscape around them. The hidden apartment is gone today, but its story remains fascinating because it showed how an ordinary commercial space could be transformed into something completely unexpected: a secret home hidden in plain sight.
