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How to Live Inside a Mall for 4 Years
The enormously entertaining Secret Mall Apartment reveals how a group of artists built a secret condo inside a Providence shopping mall.
Following the mall’s construction, politicians and developers set their sights on gentrifying the nearby lower-income neighborhood of Olneyville, home to an artists’ colony known as Fort Thunder, an abandoned warehouse where for years Providence’s impoverished creative class found room to live and work in an elaborate, art- and music-filled community. Watching Secret Mall Apartment, I was reminded at times of James Marsh’s Man on Wire(2008), about Philippe Petit’s 1974 daredevil tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Center. The secret mall apartment wasn’t public until it was finally revealed, of course, but there’s an echo of Petit’s act in the idea of these young artists carving out a home for themselves inside the unfeeling concrete beast that helped take away their community.
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