99% Invisible - 332- The Accidental Room

Episode Date: December 12, 2018

A group of artists find a secret room in a massive shopping center in Providence, RI and discover a new way to experience the mall. Plus, we look at the origin of the very first mall and the fascinating man who designed it, Victor Gruen. The Accidental Room Subscribe to Vanessa Lowe’s Nocturne DONATE NOW to Radiotopia!

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In downtown Providence, Rhode Island, there's a large plot of land that sits on the bank of the Unasquitucket River. In 1838, it was the home of the Rhode Island State Prison, which was notorious for its horrid smell, dreary outward appearance, and reputation for solitary confinement. Later, the land house, the continuing education campus for the University of Rhode Island. And after that, a dirt parking lot called Raise Park and Lock. Then in 1999, in a grand effort to revitalize the city, and with much fanfare, the Providence Place Mall was opened. That's Vanessa Lo, producer of the podcast, Nocturne. The mall costing $500 million was what was known as a super regional, a one-stop shopping

destination, housing everything consumers could possibly want or need in a totally enclosed space. Partially funded by taxpayer money, it's banned 13 acres, offered 1.4 million square feet of retail space, and dominated the riverfront. It was the largest construction project in Providence's history. This is this one building and we sort of stood in awe watching it get built. Michael Townsend is an artist who lived nearby when the mall was still under construction in the 1990s.

His daily running route took him past the construction site, and Michael says that as he watched it go up, he had an open mind about the project. He was cautiously optimistic that it would be a welcome addition to the neighborhood. But yeah, that didn't last long. Yeah, it's funny. The revolving to a building like that doesn't really kick in until the skin gets put on. When, when something in its, in its director set mode, what are you just seeing the skeleton? Like, oh, that's a pretty cool skeleton,

but as soon as the flesh is there, you're like, ooh, not pretty. Providence Place was going to be a big boxy stack of shops without much in the way of architectural niceties. And on his runs, Michael watched as that big box was slowly filled with the things that make them all a mall. As it's being built, I start to sort of do mental maps of spaces. That's going to be a story, that's going to be a storage space, that's going to be parking.

But amidst all the construction, there was one part of the building that kept catching Michael's eye, a weird space in the guts of the architecture that didn't make sense. I thought that was really odd. It didn't seem to meet the profile of either a storage space, or a parking space, or a store space. Michael wasn't sure what the space was for. It seemed to exist only by virtue of the walls intended for the more legitimate spaces around it, but the result was this room.

It was an accidental room, a remainder left over by the long division of the mall's architecture. I had never seen anything like it, never time I ran by it, I was something I would think about. Michael eventually put the strange room out of his mind. He probably would have forgotten about it entirely, except that four years later, a second group of developers encouraged by the success of Providence Place set their sights even closer to Michael.

This time, they wanted to build right on top of the historic mill district where Michael and a dozen or so other artists lived and worked in an old industrial building they called Fort Thunder. The developers had used a computer algorithm to figure out where to place a new supermarket so that it wouldn't compete with other supermarkets in the area. And I got to see this computer printout. And it's sort of like a nuclear explosion map.

You can sort of see the radius from each supermarket and their theoretical reach. And in the blank spot that was our neighborhood, they put an X directly on the building we were living. And that was just the start. The developers wanted to tear down all of the old mill buildings and replace them with yet more retail with little to no pedestrian access. And it appears that the only mantra they have is if you see a space that's underdeveloped, you have a God-given responsibility to develop it. And it was basically like having a complete stranger be like, we've been thinking about

it. And we think we want to knock your house down. And make it a parking lot if it's cool with you. Now normally this would be the part of the story when we tell you that Michael and the other residents of Fort Thunder banded together to save their home in the face of the relentless march of capital. But no, it's not that kind of story. Granted, they did save some buildings, but as for Fort Thunder.

Oh, we're actually home? Oh yeah, they f***ing leveled that. They came in with bulldozers in crane to knock that sucker flat. Fort Thunder was gone. The reason we're telling you this story is because of what happened next. Because when I see something like that I'm like oh oh really game on. Michael and his friends had lost their home and in their mind it had all started with that first mall. That was the original seeded development that

had led to everything else. And so talk began of a mall-related action. Call it art, call it a stunt, but a plan started to take shape. Michael and his friends decided that they would find a way to live in the mall for seven days. Yeah, live in the mall, and they said a rule for themselves. They couldn't leave. And without a second thought of thinking of how unfeasible that is, for our own well-being, we really felt that we had to do it. And if this sounds like a lark, well, yeah, it kind of was. But a secretly serious lark.

The four friends, they would eventually number eight, wanted to assert that spaces like the mall could belong just as much to them as to the developers. To really do this right, they would need to find a space in the mall where they could hide themselves away, and Michael had the perfect place in mind. He began to search for that mysterious room that he'd noticed when the mall was under construction all those years before. He remembered seeing that the room was connected to a kind of crevice, a narrow gap in the

building structure that eventually led out to an exterior wall. So one night Michael went to see if the entrance to that crevice had ever been sealed off. Amazingly, it had it. It was small and sort of hidden, but there was still a crack in the exterior of the mall, and so he and his then- wife Adriana turned themselves sideways and slipped inside. And then once you're in at that point, you are exploring a system of caverns long, weird, vertical caverns.

And there are places where it just falls down into the lower levels of the mall. So you've got about a foot and a half of cliff. We are looking to a black abyss. And then this series of chambers ultimately give you access to this space. The room was tall and wide, filled with the byproducts of the mall's construction from years before.

Broken two by fours and screws and plastic zip ties that hadn't even been worth removing. The space had literally been forgotten. And it was big. It was a big space that served no other purpose. It wasn't a storefront and it wasn't a stairwell. It was just big, and it was a thrill to physically find it. It'd be like, this is it. This is what I remember. The room was in the guts of the building. The part that no one was ever supposed to use, or even really see. But Michael and Adriana saw that it could still be accessed by multiple hidden entry points,

including from inside the shopping center itself. If you knew how to get there, you could walk there from the maces, but as far as they could tell, they were the only people who knew this room existed. It was at that moment that the friend's schemes started changing. The initial plan had been to spend a week in the mall, but the way they saw it, they were sitting on 750 square feet of underutilized space, and then they asked themselves, what would a developer do? Because after all. If you see a space that's underdeveloped, you have a God-giver responsibility to develop it.

So, we decided that perhaps the absolute best thing we could do is to build a condo. I like that as that is always the answer. If you're not sure what to do with the space, just make it a condo. The new plan was no longer to live in the mall for a week. It was now simply to live in the mall for days at a time, using the room as an apartment. And while that may sound like a nightmare to everyone, but a few weird artists from Providence,

Michael and his friends got to work on this little project with the excitement of new homeowners. Step one, of course, was cleaning. They had to get rid of all that debris. It's sort of like, you know, like in a prison break movie, we were literally filling up our backpacks with just dirt and grime

and then carrying it out of the mall and getting rid of it. And for every backpackful of debris they took out, they'd bring a packful of something in. Gallant jugs of water for drinking and cleaning, clamplights and extension cords for illumination, which they plugged into the mall's internal power system. Parts for an ad-hoc kitchen, they even built a center block wall to hide the space from anyone else who might venture into the cavern complex from its various other entrances.

We went and got a door that was at exact mere of the doors they used in the mall. So if you were to find it, unless you were looking really closely at first glance, it just looks exactly like a, like it had been built originally. Finally, it was time to decorate. Anything we could buy at the mall we would. A low table came in on top of that proudly perch was a television and our PlayStation.

But if we couldn't buy it at the mall, we'd have to bring it into the mall. That's for the large pieces like the China Hutch or the fourth piece sectional couch No, but nobody looked twice so that you brought pieces of a couch through the mall How did you get that in there? in broad daylight we avoided the night and Sort of worked with the ebb and flow of the mall we were just part of the You know the living organism of its daily activities. Amazing risky trying to furnish a secret apartment with a nested coffee table, but to anyone

watching. It was just a person walking through a mall with a nested coffee table that they just bought at the mall. There's simply no such thing as a suspicious consumer item in a building that is dedicated to consumerism. The friends would sometimes stay in the secret apartment for several weeks in a row, just living, watching television, making collages with shadow boxes they bought at Pottery Barn, even cooking in the ad hoc kitchen. Michael remembers burning some waffles with a waffle iron and wondering if the smoke would give them away. And when the eight friends weren't enjoying their secret apartment, they were enjoying the mall, not as shoppers, but as residents.

Thanks to its late night movie theater, the mall almost never closed. So sometimes they would just roam the building with no goal in mind, observing its many moods. There are times when that entire building probably had maybe 10 people in it, like in the middle of the night. There would be security officers, there would be cleaning staff. And it's a really wonderful time because it's like having a public park for levels deep all to yourself. And in those moments, there's a sense of ownership and I just feel really good.

Weeks turned to months and eventually years. Out of the emotional rebel-affort-s Thunder, they'd finally found their refuge, and all thanks to the mall's developers, who had accidentally provided a sanctuary from the world they were busy developing. But as the old saying goes, there comes a time in every man's life when he must stop living at the mall. Unfortunately, the sea got planted that this whole thing was going to unravel. And that's because we had a break in. One day, they came back to the apartment

only to discover that someone had kicked open the door and stole in the PlayStation, along with several other small items, including the art they had made and a photo album. But they left the silverware, they left the TV, we're like, this is a very odd burglary. Like, they didn't take the things of value. They only took the, we're like, this is a very odd burglary. They didn't take the things of value. They only took the things that were like super personal.

Michael and his friends were spooked. They had managed to hide the apartment for four years, but now someone knew about the room, someone who could come back at any time and who seemed to be interested in them. So they changed things up. They decided from now on, they'd only stay there at night

when the chances of being caught were low, never during the day. And crucially, they would double down on another rule they'd had since almost the very beginning. Don't share it with anyone. Don't physically bring anyone here who wasn't involved in the making of it. So a lot of my very, very good and best friends

never saw the space. And I'm the one who took that rule and broke it. Michael was hosting a visiting artist from Hong Kong. Her name was Jaffa. He was driving her to the bus station on her way out of town. And we're driving past the mall, and I say to myself, what can it hurt? How could this possibly backfire me? So I brought her into the space.

Her mind was absolutely blown. You gotta remember that this is at the peak of its build out. Michael showed Jaffa everything. The couch, the lights, the television. They were just days away from installing a water tank and a wood floor. In spite of the break-in, after four years of work, the apartment was on the verge of feeling like a real home. But when we're leaving, I hear a walkie-talkie on the other side of the door, with a two feet of us. And when the door opens, it's three dudes and ties and sports jackets.

And I realize in that moment, I internalize that it's over. It turned out that the earlier break-in had been the work of two of the mall's newest security cards. Instead of removing everything, they had been the work of two of the mall's newest security cards. Instead of removing everything, they had taken the personal items in hopes of figuring out who Michael and his friends were. Now that Michael had been foolish enough to come back during the day, they had their man. General Growth Properties, the company that owned them all, did not take kindly to the secret

apartment in its walls. You don't say. After being handed over to the police and interrogated, Jaffa was eventually let go. But Michael soon found himself standing in front of a judge in criminal court, charged with breaking and entering, and felony trespass. By the time I get to court, the mall is hired a lawyer,

and they launch into all these details about the illegal things that I have done. I keep my mouth shut. But after they've gone through this laundry list of illegal activities, they used the phrase, this gave Mr. Townsend access to an apartment that they had built over several years that had the following things in it and goes on to List in detail what the apartment looked like. Including the coffee table, the television, a coffee of the game Grand Theft Auto, an 8-foot China Hutch, a 4-piece Sectional Couch, silverware for 8 with matching glassware, a 6-foot pot.

And the more details this little hair gives, the more the dudge just looks around. And he's like, what's happening here? And the dudge hustles advisors, close to him, and he, I hear him whispering, and then he looks up, looks me dead in the eyes, and he goes, this is not a criminal act. We're not sure exactly what it was, but this is not a criminal act. We're not sure exactly what it was.

But this is not a crime. Whether the judge was perceiving a deep legal truth at the heart of this case, or Michael was just the beneficiary of an incredible amount of white privilege, Michael may never know. In the end, he was slapped with a misdemeanor for trespassing and released. He had lived on and off in a secret apartment for nearly four years, and it was going to cost him almost nothing. But that doesn't mean he got away entirely, Scott free.

Just before Michael left the mall, the mall security team handed him a piece of paper. The same piece of paper they handed to Brawler, shoplifters, and anyone else who has overstayed their welcome in this most private of public spaces. It's a standardized manila piece of paper which has a map of the mall. It has this red line around the whole thing and you have to sign it and it says you can't cross that red line. So they make it clear you're never coming back. Now, over a decade later, Michael still lives right near the mall. But his days of running anywhere near its 13 acres are over. And the biggest bummer for me is that

if I want to go to downtown, the path that you bring your bike through is through the center of the malt where it bridges over the river. And now that I'm banned from the malt, I have to bike around it. And I've biked around it for 10 years. Are you serious? Diligently. I have never broken this rule.

So you really can never go back? I can never broken this rule. So you really can never go back? I can never go back. This story was a co-production with the KCRW podcast Nocturn, which is produced and hosted by Vanessa Lowe. Nocturn is an exploration of the night and the landscape of the unseen, with a link on the website and in the show notes. Coming up, we go back to the mall, specifically the mall that started it all, after this. Now that we've sneaked into this weird public private space that is the mall,

I thought it'd be fun to revisit the origin story of this incredibly intriguing location, which Avery reported for us a few years ago. We've all done it. You go to the store for a pair of socks and come out with a mega pack of soda. You go out to get shampoo and come back with a fancy razor. It's hard to stick to what's on your list. I challenge you to go to IKEA and leave with only the thing for what you game. Just try to buy a lamp without buying a cutting board.

It can't be done. You absolutely knew this, but retail spaces are designed to do this to you. Producer Avery Truffleman The store is trying to look so beautiful, so welcoming, the item so enticingly displayed in such vast quantity that you cannot help but be drawn in, and then drawn towards something you don't need. This is the Grooan Effect.

The Grooan Effect, or sometimes called the Grooan Transfer, it's that moment when you walk into a store and the design of the store is so overwhelming and dazzling that you begin mindlessly consuming. The Groen Effect is named after Victor Groen. So who was Groen? He's a complicated, complex, contradictory guy. Jeff Hardwick wrote the biography of Victor Groen, who was born Victor Groenbaum. Born in Vienna in 1904, and he is Jewish in Vienna, leaves in 38.

Good call, Groenbaum. And makes his way eventually to New York City. Once in New York, Groen made a name for himself designing shops and retail spaces. And this was a particular challenge during the lean years of the late 30s. People had no money. They just wouldn't go into shops at all. But Groen figured out how to lure people inside, basically by using amazingly appealing window displays. You would go into these window display areas, look at jewelry or handbags or chocolates and then you'd be

tempted and lured into the store. I mean that's the grue and effect. Grue and argued that good design equaled good profits. And he he equates those as one to one. If you do more people are gonna stay there longer and spend more money. Grue and started making storefronts all over the country, and he moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1941. Grewin was from the beautiful city of Vienna, which is lined with shops and greenery and places to gather. He saw how most Americans were just riding around in their cars all the time,

cut off from the city and from each other, and he knew this problem was even worse in the suburbs. The suburbs lacked what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls third places. Think of home as your primary place, work as your second place. And that third place is where you go to build community to hang out, to simply feel connected. Grewen wanted to give the American suburbs that third place. The image of living in closer communication with other people, the image of having the possibility from walking to one place to another. That's archival footage of Grewen from the University of Wyoming.

The image of participating in events outside of your own little house has become a desirable factor. Victor Groen imagined designing an environment full of greenery and shops, an indoor plaza, a modern forum, an island of connection in the middle of the sprawl, one that would only be accessible to pedestrians. Because old man, Victor Grewen hated cars. He rants and raves against cars continually. One technological event has swamped us.

That is the advent of the rubber wheel vehicle, the private car, the truck, the trailer, as means of mass transportation. And they're threat. To human life and tense, he is just as great as that of the exposed sewer. It's hard to understand them with the tape hiss in the accent, but what Grooen is saying there is. The threat of cars to human life and health is as great as the exposed sewer.

So Grooen's objective was to get people to park their cars far away from these third places and walk and stroll within them. As Groen saw it, his structure would be an architectural panacea. It would remedy environmental, commercial, and sociological problems with the creation of a single building. And so, Groen presented his solution for America, the shopping mall. Groen actually wanted the shopping mall to be more than just shops. He wants them to be mixed use. He wants apartments and offices or medical centers attached to the shopping center.

He makes cases to have child care facilities, libraries, bomb shelters, a whole range of different functions. And Groen dreamed and wrote about being closed shopping center way before he ever built one. Until he finally lands a commission for the very first indoor climate controlled shopping center. In Adina, Minnesota, a place not known for its welcoming climate. Southdale represents an entirely new and dramatic concept in retail merchandising. Southdale Center opened in 1956, and it was the mother of all shopping malls.

Seriously, ruined subsequent malls were all mostly based off this original adina design. When he's doing the first enclosed shopping mall, Southdale, in a dynaminisoda, but Groo and really emphasize and what the media ends up celebrating is this massive center court. This court has enclosed and skylighted, so but not only the stores, but the shopping sidewalks. In fact, the whole area in front of the stores is air-conditioned and temperature controlled, a year-round climate of 72 degrees. For Groen, he's creating a town square.

Southdale Center wasn't quite mixed use, like Groen imagined. People didn't live in it, and something like a daycare center or a post office couldn't afford that rent. But Southdale did have local shops of all kinds, and plenty of shoppers. Southdale, tomorrow's main street, today. But from the outside, Southdale Center is not much to look at. I mean, it looks like a mall. It's a ominous, amorphous boxy shape. In designing these shopping malls, Groen ended his razzle dazzle storefronts and window displays. Southdale hardly has exterior

windows at all. He moves away from the original concept that in some ways they're going to attract by being ostentatious. The draw now is what's inside the mall. In Groen's mind, it should have pretty much a blank facade, no signage on it, and then you enter that space, and then you walk into the shopping center, and that's that sort of transformational Grooons transfer moment. Moles are designed as these sort of suburban pilgrimage sites, which of course you have to drive to. It's a commitment. You're driving 20, 30 minutes, you're parking, you're getting out of your car, you're walking in. Grewin knew that Americans love to drive, so the mall was his compromise.

You had to walk and stroll once you were inside, but the customers could drive over. So he just hates the automobile, but he never will acknowledge that he's creating these shopping centers, which are largely only accessible through cars. Ruin was right. Americans loved driving to his malls. He got commissions for them all over the country. But over time, Gruin sees that interacting these malls, these tiny suburban cities, he's

helping to drain the real cities. And so for a while, Gruen shifts his focus to urban planning. We want to rescue our cities, which because we haven't neglected our threatening to go to pieces. And so Gruen ends up being involved in urban renewal projects where he draws directly on some of the lessons learned in his suburban shopping malls and proposes bringing them back downtown.

Municipalities hire Grooen and associates to make their downtowns more like malls. Grooen turns city centers into pedestrian-only spaces full of public art and greenery and lined with shops. He made plans for Boulder, Fresno, Fort Worth, Kalamazoo. Actually, his plan for Kalamazoo became the first outdoor pedestrian shopping mall in the US. He even had a concept to turn Fifth Avenue into a pedestrian mall. He gets Manhattan to close down Fifth Avenue for a couple weeks as a test.

But a city's downtown is not a mall. It's not so easily quote unquote fixed, not so perfectly designed and controlled. Cities weren't going to become the pleasant, sterile shopping environments that Groen wanted them to be. After the riots of the 60s, he is shocked and sort of taken aback by those and was very much unprepared for them. And I think that may have been somewhat of his reason for the retreat to Vienna.

In 1968, Groen moved from Los Angeles back to Vienna, back to the Greenery and Plaza's. He had been trying to imitate. But he could not escape his own creation. There's a shopping mall that's being built on the edge of Vienna. And he points to that as how that shopping mall is destroying downtown Vienna. In Groen's mind,

Vienna was already perfectly planned. It didn't need a mall like the broken American suburbs did. As he saw it, his original vision had been completely skewed. After being in Vienna about 10 years, he gives a speech and writes a paper where he says, I refuse to pay alimony for these bastard developments. Victor Gruehn, the mall maker, became the foremost mall critic. And meanwhile, America's love affair with malls continued. Did you want to pass the mall?

It's a pretty girl like you doing sitting alone in the middle of this money, to consumerism. Let's go to the mall! I know I remember in my own experience growing up in New Jersey when the first mall opened anywhere near me when I was in high school. This is Ellen Dunham Jones. She's a professor of architecture and urban design at Georgia Tech. It was cool to go to the mall, but I mean literally it was air conditioned. My home wasn't air conditioned, my school wasn't air conditioned.

Today, most of us are spending our days and our nights in completely thermally controlled environments. A lot of us are craving being able to be outdoors. In recent decades our tastes have veered away from climate controlled environments and away from the indoor mall. Mall construction actually peaked in 1990. It's been declining ever since and by 2006 is really the last brand new kind of standard conventional mall that's been built in the US. And a new product has entered the scene, a kind of shopping center that the ICSC, the International Council of Shopping Centers, calls a Lifestyle centers started appearing in the 90s and they tend to be open air so you don't have that roof anymore, but you have a lot of boutiques and a lot more restaurants.

Lifestyle centers are malls disguised as main streets. Even though they're full of chain stores, lifestyle centers are sunny and walkable and bustling, and kind of what Victor grew and imagined. And some of the old-style indoor shopping malls are being repurposed. Several of them are being retrofitted into Hispanic community centers, like in Plaza Fiesta outside of Atlanta. A lot of the stores have been cut up into much smaller mom and pop, small shops,

selling western ware, selling cantonera dresses. Plaza Fiesta also has a steady events calendar of performances. In this too was kind of what grew and imagined. These sort of community malls are truly places to gather and spend money in the shell of the failed design. Most people architectural historians especially, they grew and was a horrible architect. And you know, I can see where they're coming from. I mean, his exteriors of his building are uniformly boring. But for grew and that wasn't the point. It was Groen, that wasn't the point. It was the interiors that were really the point. Those fountains, the cheesy statues,

the elevator music piped in through all those speakers, those are all part of the Groen effect, and they helped turn shopping malls into spaces where we felt comfortable staying and spending time and money. A lot of the original indoor malls are abandoned now. Seriously, like some of them are growing weeds inside. There's a website that's become sort of a graveyard of deadmalls called deadmalls.com. Users can log on and submit stories of the deadmalls in their towns.

There are around 450 malls listed there, submitted as sort of oral histories. In particular, what's interesting, I think, about deadmalls.com is how nostalgic a lot of this is. And it does make sense. I mean, in so many suburban communities, the mall became the de facto town center. It was really the center of social life other than the school. I would be very sad if all of Victor Grunz malls were demolished. We should certainly work to

preserve at least one. The most famous mall in Minnesota may be the mall of America. With its roller coaster, its zipline, its aquarium, and water park. But the most architecturally significant mall, its grandfather, is the one that's just a 12-minute drive away in a diner. Jeff Hardwick's book is called Mallmaker, Victor grue an architect of an American dream. An Ellen Dunham Jones book is called Retro-Fitting Suburbania, special thanks to Claire Dordy for research help.

Part 1 of 99% of his book was produced by Vanessa Lo from Nocturne and Joe Rosenberg. Mixing Tech Production by Sharif Yusuf Music by Sean Rial. Part 2 was produced by Avery Trouffleman in early 2015. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team is senior editor, Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Lee, Terran Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. You can find Vanessa Lowe's haunting show, Nocturn,

at NocturnPodcast.org. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-L-W in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in in beautiful downtown Oakland, California.