GoKawiilIn downtown Providence, Rhode Island there is a large and prominent plot of land that sits on the bank of the Woonasquatucket River. In 1838, it was the home of the the Rhode Island State Prison. Later, the land housed the Continuing Education campus for the University of Rhode Island. After that came the dirt parking lot of Ray’s Park & Lock.
In a grand effort to revitalize the city, the Providence Place Mall was opened in 1999. The mall cost 500 million dollars to build, and was considered a “super regional,” meaning a one-stop shopping destination that housed everything consumers could possible want or need in one location.
Artist Michael Townsend lived nearby when the mall was going up. At first, Townsend had an open mind about the project. He was cautiously optimistic that it could bring more people and business to the neighborhood.
An Accidental Room
Townsend’s daily running route took him past the construction site, and he watched as the building slowly took shape. There was one particular part of the building that kept catching his eye. Amidst all the bustle of construction, there seemed to be a spot where nothing was going on.
There were two giant walls which almost touched, but not quite. Townsend remembered thinking to himself: “Why isn’t that just one wall? Why would you build two walls with enough space to squeeze through them?” The narrow canyon between the walls led to a seemingly unused space that was a couple of stories up, but didn’t quite seem to be storage or parking space. Townsend wasn’t sure what the space was doing there. All he knew was that the result was a kind of accidental room in the guts of the building, that only existed by virtue of the intentionally designed rooms around it.
The Fall of Fort Thunder
Four years later, a second group of developers, encouraged by the success of Providence Place, set their sights on Townsend’s neighborhood. He lived in a historic mill district with several other artists in a building called Fort Thunder.
This new development project used a specialized computer algorithm to determine where the best place to construct was, and unfortunately for Townsend, it was right on Fort Thunder — “like, where the two lines crossed each other … was a predator drone strike on my bedroom.”
The developers wanted to tear down nearly all of the old mill buildings and replace them with more retail. Townsend would end up spending the next two years fighting alongside other residents to save the mill district, but unfortunately, the building was replaced by a parking lot for a supermarket.
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