Puccini’s struggling poets and dreamers had their Parisian Latin Quarter in “La Bohème,” which begat “Rent” a century later, with its Lower East Side New York squatters singing of pricey, boutique Santa Fe, for some reason.

The real world tells myriad stories of similar artistic spirits, finding a place to call their own. For example:

In 2003, a group of Providence, Rhode Island, artists embarked on a project combining installation art and surreptitious living arrangements. The year before, they’d been booted out of the city’s Eagle Square neighborhood, lined with decrepit but tantalizing old mill warehouses. The one they called home was in Fort Thunder, demolished for redevelopment like so many beautiful, usable ruins in so many other parts of America.

What to do? Four of these Providence residents located a strange little tucked-away space in the bowels of the newly built Providence Place mall. For them, the mall exemplified everything not right with city officials and developers displacing entire waves of young artists, squatting or legally renting, in the name of better living through upscale retail.

They found the space and sneaked in, wondering: Could they evade mall security for an entire week? They could. Four years later, their adaptive reuse project came to an end. The delightful and finally rather moving documentary “Secret Mall Apartment” combines footage shot between 2003 and 2007 of this adventure with director Jeremy Workman’s contemporary interviews with the key participants.

It was, says one of the four down-low residents, a “funny kind of teenage mall existence.” With Michael Townsend, a longtime instructor with the Rhode Island School of Design, as the seriously committed front man, Adriana Valdez-Young (married to Townsend at the time), Andrew Oesch, Jay Zehngebot and Townsend figured out the best ways to access their secret lair, one being through the mall’s movie theater security doors. They ate a lot of popcorn during those four years.

They “borrowed” some furniture from the stores and eventually bought dozens of cinderblocks, matching their windowless cinderblock surroundings, walling off their apartment to keep security guards from discovering them too easily. Their weirdly cozy 750-square-foot studio layout, a tiny dot in a 3.5 million-square-foot hunk of capitalism, was to these bohemian commandos a rebuke to the city’s destruction of their old neighborhood close to the mall. Townsend describes the off-the-books apartment this way: “Like a barnacle on a whale.”

If “Secret Mall Apartment” stuck to a sardonic comic groove, it’d probably still be worthwhile. But director Workman and company find more than that, in a true story of a truly nutty living situation. Townsend and company’s artistic endeavors during those four years truly meant something: They developed far-flung “tape art” projects — silhouettes and Keith Haring-style graphic illustrations using masking tape — as part of site-specific work memorializing Sept. 11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as dressing up a children’s hospital interior. The mall project, which brought in a small, trusted group of other artist friends who came and went, served as their ironically unsafe safe space, while they poured their energy into some challenging and highly public work outside.

Issues of urban renewal, the value of public art, the difficulty of being married to an obsessive artist and lots more run through Workman’s film. It’s consistently, thoughtfully engaging. And, yes, often very funny in its open-hearted embrace of the DIY spirit, legal or otherwise.

———

'SECRET MALL APARTMENT'

3.5 stars (out of 4)

No MPA rating (some flagrant trespassing, nonviolent)

Running time: 1:31

How to watch: Now in theaters

———

©2025 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.