6 ms·
“Secret Mall Apartment,” a Protest for Place
- Animats 1y agoDone in 2003. Written up in 2018, with pictures.[1] This is PR for a movie about it. [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-accidental-room/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-accidental-room/
- iaaan 1y agoTangentially related question: I recently got into 99PI and love it, listen to every episode that comes put now. Any other podcast recommendations?
- vunderba 1y ago99% Invisible, RadioLab, and This American Life were three of my favorite podcasts.
- xattt 1y agoHave you listened to the entire back catalogue?
- zoklet-enjoyer 1y agoGreat show. I'm actually listening to it right now haha. Been listening for years.
- TrueGeek 1y agoDear Hank and John
- rv3392 1y agoI love Dear Hank and John, but IMO it's nothing like 99PI.
- DrewADesign 1y agoThe Secret Mall Apartment documentary got significantly more collaboration from nearly everyone involved, including a dump of the significant digital video stash from the project. Lots of people have tried making this documentary but until this one, nobody's gotten anywhere close to this deep about it. I'm on the periphery of this particular art scene and have seen lots of the related stuff.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agoone of my favorite cases of contemporary-ish american squatting.
- deadbabe 1y agoI love secret living spaces. Has anyone here spent time inhabiting one?
- RandomBacon 1y agoNo, but if anyone is interested: last time I visited the Ala Moana Center (an open-air mall) in Honolulu, I thought that would be a great place to do so: good temperatures, easy access to low-use back hallways, empty storage rooms off said hallways. There might be other places in Honolulu. Because space has such a premium there, there are a lot of odd/conforming layouts in many different buildings, that it could be very easy to construct something in a corner or dead-end. There are many walkable parts to the city and bus transportation, many people get by without cars there. Just don't add to the homeless population there please. It's sad to see families with children in diapers, living in tents at a park :-/ It is not a place to "re-invent" or "discover" yourself, or "start-over".
- dgunay 1y agoSome friends of mine drilled some plywood into the trunks of a set of overgrown trees by the side of the road when I was a kid, to use as an airsoft arena. We didn't live there or anything, but it was cool to have a secret space that was relatively spacious and secluded from view by all the leaves and branches. Some nosy neighbors eventually dismantled it because they thought a homeless person was living there or something.
- toofy 1y agoif ya love learning about secret spaces, there is documentary named Dark Days about the hundreds of people who lived in the Freedom Tunnels beneath Manhattan in the 90s. incredible incredible movie. the Freedom Tunnels where the crew did their filming are miles and miles of unused tunnels under Manhattan, formerly used for trains. once the trains stopped using them people built entire shanty towns, the director of Dark Days got thousands of hours of footage of the people inside one of these shanty towns. it’s amazing what the crew got footage of. people building entire little shanty houses and little villages. wild stuff. i mean, i wouldn’t have lived there, but id be lying if i didnt admit a part of me finds it amazing what they threw together. for years, entire secret shanty villages right under the city with small village sized populations.
- neom 1y agoOne of the people involved in this "project" worked for me, and then during their term of working for me, worked very hard behind my back against me. I only found out about the project after I was fired and they had taken control of my startup, and I have to say: I wasn't at all surprised.
- Loughla 1y agoHow do you get fired from your own startup? I'm not involved in these things, but it seems like if you're the creator, you can't get fired?
- neom 1y agoCan't lead if nobody will follow. It was also my own fault- I'm not blaming them. They were a key leader in my exec team and I found out after they: hated startup, hated capitalism, and hated me.
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoWow, so they were a 'mole' from the beginning who only joined with the intention of destroying it? That's sociopathic.
- neom 1y agoI don't think it was that insidious. Once venture dollars got involved and we started to hire more "business people" - the folks who liked the social aspects of our work got turned off and became emotional, leading to a lot of shadow work I was totally unaware of, ultimately resulting in my ousting. I want to be clear: I have responsibility in the situation also, I was the CEO and it was my failure. I ultimately mismanaged.
- brookside 1y agoI'm absolutely intrigued by your story and want to hear a fuller account, if there's any chance you are willing.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- toofy 1y agowent to the documentary about this at a local theater a few days ago. was good, even kept my 10 yo niece’s attention. for years i had been wondering why we didn’t have apartments/condos directly attached to malls, particularly in cold climates, so when the articles first started coming out about this it definitely scratched an itch. the movie has a ton of video footage they filmed back when they were using the space, including footage of them sneaking the couches, furniture, and 1000s of pounds of cinder blocks in. it’s pretty gripping in that “omg can they pull this off!!??” kind of way.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoIn Japan (Tokyo, at least), they have buildings with apartments, and hotels, directly attached to shopping centers. I have heard that Manhattan has buildings like that, as well.
- skwashd 1y agoNot just Tokyo or Japan. It is the same in Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, big cities in China and more.
- globular-toast 1y agoWe even have this in the UK. I lived in one. It was funny to me to live in the shopping centre.
- noir_lord 1y agoThey have a few of them in very cold climates as well, schools, shops, medical clinics and housing all in one building. For the simple practical reason of going outside is somewhere between deeply unpleasant and actually dangerous. Whittier, Alaska is a good example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naPguX84Amg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naPguX84Amg
- rufus_foreman 1y agoThat's what I was wondering, do I get the whole story from the movie review, or should I actually watch the documentary?
- gravitronic 1y agoTheir act was cool. Post-hoc bolting a protest social action on top seemed dishonest. It's fine to say you did something cool because you could, in fact the coolest things are done just because. Adding commentary that it was a protest for stolen / wasted space, spare me the minutes please
- ghushn3 1y agoYou should hang more in anarchist circles. Squatting as a protest and as an art piece has been alive and well for far, far longer than I've been alive. (40-50 years) Go read about the Paris Commune, Villa Road, Pieds Plats, Frances Street, or that group who squatted in NYC until the city capitulated and turned the buildings into low income housing. What evidence do you have that they aren't genuine about their reasons, given it's not at all uncommon for squats to exist as a form of protest?
- gravitronic 1y agoWell, I watched it. The archival footage makes it pretty clear they did it for the lulz and only in the present day interviews do they bolt a social action to it. I prefer if they kept it purely for the lulz because then it was art.
- ccppurcell 1y agoAll actions have social consequences.
- ghushn3 1y ago> I prefer if they kept it purely for the lulz because then it was art. Art can exist for the purpose of protest. Art can exist for the purpose of profit. Art can exist "for the lulz". Who made you the arbiter of art? Jeez, you'd look at Guernica today and complain Picasso was an SJW with an attitude like that.
- palmfacehn 1y agoHere's another interesting story: "Man built a bunker under Hampstead Heath and lived in it for two years" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22493078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22493078
- sandspar 1y agoInteresting how the ringleader appears to be significantly older than the other participants. This is a common pattern. As I recall, the poet Ginsberg was older than his hippy hangers-on. And I've read of that "older leader" pattern in groups as wide apart as graffiti crews or revolutionary movements. I guess that forming these kinds of small scenes relies a lot of charisma and vision, people tend to accumulate those with age, and older people tend to have a magnetic effect on younger followers.
- ccppurcell 1y agoAnother explanation is that only a small fraction of the counter culture at any given time are in it for the long haul. It's tiring and expensive and complicated and more or less incompatible with having children. So the ones who stick it out inevitably have to collaborate with younger people.
- dmurray 1y agoThis, plus the part where the person who's been doing something the longest and has the most experience is likely to become the de facto leader.
- Stevvo 1y agoAmazing this can be a story and movie in America. In Europe people squat in any building suitable and this group would be considered just another nuisance bunch of homeless people.
- Planktonne 1y ago> although they periodically hint at their left-leaning politics, admirably dedicate their time and skills to projects paying tribute to the first-responder firemen who perished on 9/11, the victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and sick children in hospitals This is an extremely strange framing; there's nothing anti-left in caring about sick children and the victims of terrorism.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoBecause the presumption is one must announce the camp to which they belong or be pigeonholed automatically into one or another.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoLike the plot of Shooting Fish but with less crime and more solidarity.