On a freezing cold December day 25 years ago, Raphael Lyon and I watched as salvage crews took what they could from the demolition of the Silver Springs Bleaching and Dyeing complex — a sign of the growing threat to the creative ecosystem offered by old mill buildings in Providence.
“We have this chance that other cities don’t have – to do it right,” Lyon told me as part of my coverage in the now-defunct Providence Phoenix. ”We don’t have to make the mistakes that other cities made in the ‘60s,” by destroying historic neighborhoods through so-called urban renewal programs. “We can proceed intelligently and carefully.”
But instead of proceeding intelligently and carefully, things got worse when a developer demolished the old mill housing Fort Thunder — the throbbing nerve center of Providence’s creative underground — to build a flavorless suburban-style strip plaza.
Lyon went on to acclaim as a musician performing under the name Mudboy. He now lives in New York City but still uses a 401 area code, one of innumerable artists who have moved from Providence. People will always come and go for various reasons. But as the biggest city in the smallest state, Providence may face more consequences from gentrification than larger cities.
A putative supporter of the arts, Mayor Buddy Cianci supported the development plan for the home of Fort Thunder, revealing a disparity between the rhetoric and reality of nurturing Providence’s creative community.
Providence Place opened in 1999, not long after FBI agents swept through City Hall and Buddy Cianci’s home on Power Street, unveiling the Plunder Dome probe that would land Cianci in federal prison.
“We have primed the pump of economic revival,” Cianci told me around the time after the mall opened. He predicted Providence Place would have a series of positive spinoff effects.
Jeremy Workman’s superb documentary, Secret Mall Apartment — about how artist Mike Townsend and a group of friends created a hidden home in the recesses of American retail — posits that Providence Place signaled open season on the old mills west of the mall.
Some people saw it coming.
When I talked with AS220 co-founder Bert Crenca about the arrival of the mall, he was mindful of a time when Lupo’s was closed, the Met Cafe was shuttered, Empire Street was a de facto red light district and people were afraid to come downtown after dark. By 1999, Providence was the title and setting of an eponymous soap drama on NBC, and hype about the “Providence renaissance” hawked by Cianci had gone into overdrive.
Despite feeling good about a more vibrant and interesting downtown, Crenca worried that Providence Place marked the start of a fundamental change in the city.
“What tends to disturb me is the notion that arts and artists and diversity are stepping stones,” he told me in 1999. “It’s very easy, now that the money’s coming in, for these developers to shortlist us. I think that would be a monumental mistake.”
In the time after the demise of Fort Thunder, the squeeze on the mill space that offered fertile ground for artists got increasingly worse. The threat to Atlantic Mills is the latest example.
That was years before wider recognition spread of Rhode Island’s housing crisis and how difficult it is to make progress in addressing it.
The pandemic left fewer people working and walking around downtown — a situation with echoes of how downtown Providence was largely barren at night in the 1980s and the West Side was filled with abandoned shells of the city’s industrial past.
“Providence at the time effectively, it felt like a ghost town,” Michael Townsend told me before a recent screening of Secret Mall Apartment. “On a Saturday night, if you went downtown, you could walk around for hours and never see another person, except for Haven Brothers. That was it.”
The area west of the mall still has an unfinished feeling about it, as if caught between competing desires to be left alone and for something more to happen, even if the cost of real estate has soared.
Secret Mall Apartment is a tribute to the imagination of Townsend and his friends who made Providence Place their own creative playground. It’s a love letter to these underground artists and how they make Providence special.
The low-fi archival footage shot by the artists of them doing their thing, since they know their creations tend to be transitory, is a key part of the film. That’s especially true for Townsend, who creates murals using masking tape.
When the secret apartment was discovered in 2007, after almost four years of operation, it shocked General Growth Properties, the corporation that owned Providence Place at the time.
“It was wrong on a number of levels,” Dante Bellini, a spokesman for the mall owners, told the ProJo at the time. “It was certainly wrong in its irresponsibility. And it was illegal. It was like a person breaking into your basement or your car at night and sleeping there … [We] certainly feel violated.”
(Bellini, a PR man-turned-filmmaker, is an associate producer of Secret Mall Apartment. Regarding his critical remarks from 2007, he said, “At the time, there wasn’t a lot of information to go on. I was only parroting what was told to me to tell to the press.”)
Providence police seemed bemused and impressed by the artists’ audacity.
Towsend said as he was handcuffed, “The police officer who grabbed me was like, ‘It’s pretty cool, what you did in there.’ I was like, ‘Huh! That’s interesting.’ And they were exceedingly kind to me.”
“When the detectives took the time to interrogate me to try to find out all the information they could about the space, I did my best to tell them the 100% truth about everything,” Townsend said.
“And I realized in that moment, you know what? Back to the mantra — if you have a piece of artwork that you truly believe in, you think it’s good, you have nothing to worry about. And that ended up being very true, all the way up to [how] the judge looked at it and said, ‘This is not a criminal act.’”
Towsend, a youthful 54, had to wait 18 years to be readmitted to Providence Place, where Secret Mall Apartment is drawing an enthusiastic turnout.
As we spoke amid a couch and coffee table setup meant to simulate the secret apartment in the lobby of the cinema at Providence Place, he said reading about how Providence has one of the nation’s hottest housing markets “makes me a little sick to my stomach.”
Artists will find a way, he said.
“However, for people coming from a lower income bracket or people trying to start their lives or careers here in Providence,” Townsend said, “it’s going to be much more difficult for them to do that, and the loss of mill space is the true horror for me. The mill spaces for me are the ultimate playground and laboratory for artists to begin their careers in a lot of cases and become remarkably good at their craft.”
Looking back to the late 90s, Townsend said, “I would say if you wanted to become the best artist that you could possibly be, you move to Providence. And that was because the mill spaces were cheap enough that you could focus your whole life on your art. So much of the best art I’ve seen came out of Providence during that time and it’s a real loss to lose those people and those spaces.”
