Secret Mall Apartment

“Secret Mall Apartment” is a Search Engine Optimization-friendly title for a documentary that’s about a lot of things that cannot be captured in three words. Directed by Jeremy Workman, it tells the story of a group of friends from a rundown, artist-friendly neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island who got pushed out of their homes by a fancy new mall that was the opening salvo in a massive gentrification project. They found an unoccupied, seemingly unmapped spot inside the mall that pushed them out and began furnishing it as a living space. It existed for three years. During that time, the group managed to avoid detection by mall security or even other patrons.

Workman has said that as he worked on this film, he “quickly learned that they created the secret apartment to make a statement against gentrification. They had lost their homes as a result of development, and this was their unique personal way to show developers that they weren’t going anywhere.”

However, as the movie demonstrates, there were other elements in the mix. One was the thrill of doing a victimless, playful protest crime in plain sight of mall staff and customers who never noticed that the same eight people were hanging out in the mall constantly, rarely buying anything but food court items, and disappearing and reappearing for hours at a time without leaving the complex. The group slowly created a “normal” apartment in a concrete-walled, high-ceilinged, 750-square-foot room accessible only through crawl spaces and a tall, narrow set of metal stairs (which must’ve been hell to navigate with the dish cabinet and multiple couches that ended up in the space).