The couple who lived in a mall

After Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto found their skyline blighted by a colossal mall, they protested it in an unusual way -- they moved in.

By Lisa Selin Davis

Read more: Consumerism, Protests, Performance Art, Globalization, Life, Lisa Selin Davis

Aug. 15, 2008 | Monday night, millions gathered around the television to watch an event years in the making. No, I'm not talking about the Olympics. Rather, Monday night was the premiere of "The American Mall," MTV's "High School Musical" rip-off in which teenage dramas unfold under the dizzying fluorescents of a food court. It's a story, so says the promo, about a place we all love, where everything is for sale but love and dreams.

Like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" or "Mallrats," "The American Mall" presents the enclosed shopping mall -- America's most iconic, infamous and replicated retail phenomenon -- as the ultimate gathering place (which was, in fact, the intention of inventor Victor Gruen, the Holocaust survivor who created the first indoor shopping mall in Edina, Minn., in 1956). Funny thing, though: We all love the mall a little less right now. Retail vacancies have hit 6.3 percent in regional malls, the highest number in six years, and not a single new, enclosed shopping mall was built last year. As we hold tighter to our wallets, what's going to become of all that empty consumer space?

Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto have an answer.

The Rhode Island couple awoke one morning in 1998 to find the name of their street changed: Kinsley Avenue was now Providence Place, which happened to be the name of the 1.3 million-square-foot mall rising on 13 prime downtown acres. Townsend and Yoto were among the Providence residents objecting to the mall -- the cost to taxpayers, the colonizing presence of the structure that dominated the skyline from the highway. But Yoto, a scholar, and Townsend, a public artist, expressed their outrage in an unusual way: They decided to live with the mall. Literally.

In 2003, inside a 750-foot storage space, abandoned since construction days, they crafted a secret apartment within the mall from which they could study its allure. Why do so many of us flock to the mall's sanitized hallways? Why do we love the sameness of mall life, identical shops and structures across the country? Why is the mall the site of our grievances, the place where gunmen go to inflict maximum pain? Earlier this year, a man set off an explosion in a mall in Exeter, England. The week before, a woman was shot in one.

Clearly, we have complicated emotional relationships to malls, and Townsend and Yoto figured one way to comprehend all that they critiqued was to embrace it, to live it so they might understand it. The mall adventure was to last a week; it went on for four years. If Townsend hadn't been nabbed by security and charged with criminal trespassing last October, they'd still be camping out there today.

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The mall as we know it today -- an enclosed concrete box of shops, connected by common space -- is only 52 years old, created by Gruen, an Austrian Socialist Jew who thought he was inventing a utopian, community-oriented commercial center. The mall was meant to pull people together from disparate regional corners; instead, with the help of the trusty automobile, it drained those corners, dismembering many a downtown.

But Providence Place was Mall 2.0: four floors, 170 shops and eight restaurants and "entertainment venues" (we called those movie theaters when I was a kid), on the former site of the University of Rhode Island School of Continuing Education building, that were expected to draw people back to downtown, instead of pulling them away. This new breed of mall was not a hulking, ugly box of concrete plopped down among former farmland, but a camouflaged structure, clad in brick and placed at the city's center.

"Almost no developer builds malls anymore," said Paco Underhill, author of "Call of the Mall." "They build 'alls.'" Hotels, offices, libraries and, yes, residences are now folded into mall developments. Only one traditional enclosed shopping mall was built in 2006 and none last year. Many older structures are being "demalled," in the language of the industry: razed and rebuilt as mixed-use, open-air facilities we call lifestyle centers -- they're not just shopping centers anymore.

For many people, especially outside America, malls represent a sunnier future, despite the lack of weather inside. The opening of a mall in Soweto, South Africa, for instance, prompted a citywide celebration with Nelson Mandela presiding. But because they are repositories of our aspirations -- when you're at the mall, the better you always hovers within reach -- they're also magnets for our frustration. Last November, a gunman killed eight people in an Omaha, Neb., mall, declaring, "Now I'll be famous," before killing himself.

The daughter of a Chinese economist and a fashionable Venezuelan beauty queen, Adriana Yoto, 30, grew up in Chappaqua, N.Y., obsessed with mall shopping. Michael Townsend, 37, came from God-fearing Christian parents in a suburb of Worcester, Mass., and played "Commando" at the mall arcade (he claims to have held the national record at one point). "Our mallifications were very different," he said.

Shopping had been a point of contention in their marriage long before Providence Place became their neighbor. When she chose to marry Townsend, who makes his living crafting (quite beautiful) murals out of tape, Yoto's folks told her, "Misery can only be your destiny," because he couldn't support her Nordstrom habit on an artist's pay. She eventually recovered from shopoholism but was left with such passion for malls that she went on to study them, earning a master's in international relations from the New School, where last year she proffered theories on malls as modern-day British colonies.

Four years after the mall opened, Yoto, Townsend and six friends in their art collective, called Trummerkind ("children of the ruins" in German), vowed to spend a full week at the mall that had transformed their city, to use the mall as an actual public space while surviving sans commerce.

"The mall has something really positive to offer, something that has nothing to do with shopping," Townsend told me.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I don't know -- that's what I moved there to find out."

They never intended to undermine the mall or its corporate structure, or to make a spectacle of themselves. Townsend describes himself as "wired for happiness" and Yoto's idea of a good time is cataloguing all the items in a store and rating their desirability from "gift-worthy" to "if-it-were-the-apocalypse-and-I-was-looting-I-would-take-it." Which is precisely what they did during their stint living at the mall. Every day.

Each of them voted in one item (a flashlight, space blanket, sketchbook and facecloth) and accepted an allowance of $20. "I had a lot of tea," said Yoto. They camouflaged themselves, carrying empty Nordstrom bags and wearing mall outfits -- nice slacks and button-down shirts (more of a stretch for Townsend, who will happily wear the same pair of sneakers until they're held together with tape). At night they had to skirt through a 2-foot-wide passage to the dark space Townsend had found, its walls and ceiling coated in what Yoto described as "opaque gray oatmeal mixed with the contents of a lint trap." They made a bed of cardboard and insulation tiles where they spent cold nights, not risking capture by using the mall off-hours. They washed up -- it was dusty -- in mall bathrooms, while Yoto arrived at the porcelain sink in the Origins store each morning, sampling its face cleansers. Occasionally, they leafed through books at Borders.

They were, after four days, both completely bored and totally ecstatic. "I felt this vacation-like euphoria that I've never felt till then or since then," Townsend said. "It was better for me than any nature walk I've every taken." Let's be clear: He's not being ironic -- this is wired-for-happiness talking. They felt they had subverted the mall's reason for existence by not buying anything, yet they had achieved what it promised: a release from the burdens of everyday life, within walking distance.

Next page: "For so many people, the mall was the first place they got to see the world"