Secret Mall Apartment: Strange True Stories from the Artists Who Lived in a Mall

Secret Mall Apartment: Strange True Stories from the Artists Who Lived in a Mall

In this episode of the Compendium we explore the incredibly wholesome story of Michael Townsend, the artist who secretly lived in Mall for four years. After finding himself evicted from his home Michael and his team of Trummerkinds transformed an unused space in Providence Place Mall into a fully furnished home, complete with electricity and sofas and even a PlaySation all sourced from the mall itself.

Behind the shops, escalators and food court, a hidden apartment quietly existed inside a working mall for four years.

Secret Mall Apartment follows artist Michael Townsend and the Trummerkind collective, who transformed an unused space inside Providence Place Mall into a hidden home. This episode revisits Secret Mall Apartment as a strange true story about eviction, gentrification, guerrilla living, hidden spaces and the oddly wholesome audacity of building a private apartment in the middle of a shopping centre.

We explore how the artists found the mall hidden room, furnished it with items sourced from the mall, added electricity and sofas, and treated the space as both a residency and a quiet act of protest. Secret Mall Apartment is not a conventional crime story; it is weird history, urban exploration and a social experiment about who gets to occupy space in a city being redesigned around consumption.

For listeners of a documentary podcast, history podcast, hidden histories and what really happened episodes, this is the story of artists living in a mall, a secret room in Providence, Rhode Island, and the kind of urban survival that feels more charming than criminal.

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