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.
Resources and Further Reading
- Secret Mall Apartment (2024) - by Jeremy Workman​​
- Trummerkind - Micheal Townsend Blog
Host & Show Info
- Hosts: Kyle Risi & Adam Cox
- Intro Music: Alice in dark Wonderland
Community & Calls to Action
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- Website: thecompendiumpodcast.com
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