The Good 5 Cent Cigar

Issue date: 12/5/07 Section: Campus

Media Credit: Alexandra Gifford Michael Townsend and his wife Adriana Yoto [not pictured] spoke in the Galanti Lounge in the University of Rhode Island's Library yesterday afternoon about living in Providence Place for more than four years.

Media Credit: Alexandra Gifford

12/05/07 - In 2003 and 2004, Providence Place ran a television advertisement that asked how great it would be to live in the mall.

Michael Townsend, 36, of Providence did just that along with eight other artists, albeit illegally. Townsend, along with his wife Adriana Yoto, came to the University of Rhode Island yesterday to speak about his experiences during the four years that they lived in the mall.

More than 50 students and faculty attended the lecture in the Galanti Lounge of the University Library.

"In 1997, they started building the Providence Place mall. This was the largest construction project Rhode Island had ever taken on and what it did is it heralded in a new era … sort of a self-esteem boost, for Providence itself," Townsend said.

Before the mall was built, there were many developers that proposed a blueprint for the mall.

"The words that kept coming up were 'under-utilized space' and 'we need to build community here,'" Yoto said.

Townsend said he used to run near Providence Place during its construction. During his runs he said he saw several parts of the building "were destined to be abandoned."

He eventually found one of these spots when he and seven other artists decided to live in the mall.

"All these large buildings that exist have these kinds of infrastructures and we just happened to have a good old fashioned anomaly," Townsend said. "It's inevitable when you're planning a building of this size that you are going to miss 11 inches and 11 inches gave us access to 750 square feet that was completely off the radar."

In 2003, Townsend, Yoto and the others artists began to stay in the mall apartment created from a vacant space in the malls parking garage. The group would live in the apartment for three weeks at a time. They had electricity, but there was no running water and they used bathrooms in the mall. For fun, the group visited the mall's many stores.

"We spent a day just at Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel trying to look at every single object … there are so many things to look at," Yoto said.

"There is something about malls that sort of undermines the sense of trust," Townsend said.

Yoto and Townsend, who were initially opposed to the construction of Providence Place planned to make the mall their part-time home. They "micro-developed" their apartment and made it quite comfortable, with a couch, television and videogame system.

Although this sounded like a good idea, Townsend was recently caught by mall security and was arrested. His punishment includes probation and a ban from the mall.

"This Christmas was going to be the best Christmas ever. By Dec. 25 we were going to have our plumbing in, our kitchen in, we would have had our Christmas tree and it was going to be awesome." Townsend said.

Townsend, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate, also uses the medium of tape to present art across the city and the country. He uses the adhesive tape to create murals that are removable, yet interactive with the environment that they are place in.

Townsend and Yoto will open a reprisal and presentation entitled "The Apartment at the Mall" on Dec. 8 in Providence.

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