Boston Gal's Open Wallet

I've got a cliff dwelling in the Catskills and a bunker near a waterfall in Pennsylvania. I'm like a beaver. I can carve a place into the woods, and you'd never know it was there.

Rounds: "With a bucket and a shovel, day by day. I'd go to the soup kitchen, and then I'd just start digging the hole. The bunker is more energy efficient and loses less heat. I wouldn't be exposed to the wind. And I wouldn't need to build any walls. I'd just use the dirt for the walls. So I'd only need a roof. So it was more economics that I did it for."

Clarence went to the Buffalo Public Library and read engineering books to learn how to make the bunker as structurally sound as possible. The initial fear was that heavy winter snow would cause it to collapse.

"I got books on roof framing, post framing, and things like that, so that I would have the formulas available to calculate the loads properly so the roof wouldn't collapse on me while I was sleeping," added Rounds.

Getting to the penthouse suite isn't so easy. Once on the roof you have to climb another ladder to get inside the dome. Inside, there are surround sound speakers, tract lighting, an air conditioning unit, microwave and even a bathroom!

"I knew the guy was talented, but not like this," Goldberg said.

Last week Goldberg saw the man and called police.

"That's the hole he rappelled out of," he pointed out. "You can still see the rope hanging from it."

"I felt very happy (there), very present, very sort of enthused and full of life," he said. Living at the mall for a week in that space was the best vacation he has ever had, he added, like being at a beach in Jamaica.

Soon, Townsend and the other artists decided to "microdevelop" the space into a home and to think of the mall as its own city.

"I wanted to spend a lot of time (at the mall)," he said. "I wanted to understand the people going there, the architecture, the environment, the attitude ... the gravitational pull that is the mall."

The artists bought over two tons of construction material to build a cinderblock wall. They installed a door to make the space into a room. By 2004, they had begun moving pieces of furniture into the space, noticed but unquestioned by mall security and mall-goers, Townsend said.

The unheated "apartment" lacked running water and its four bulbs were lit with the help of an 80-foot long extension chord that ran to nearby unused sockets. But the apartment did have a PlayStation for the artists' entertainment.

Labels: Living Small