85,000 Pieces From Beloved Chinatown Museum Likely Destroyed in Fire (original) (raw)

New York|85,000 Pieces From Beloved Chinatown Museum Likely Destroyed in Fire

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/nyregion/chinatown-museum-fire.html

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The president of the Museum of Chinese in America said that she was “just distraught” and that the collection was one of a kind.

Much of the collection of the Museum of Chinese in America may have been ruined after a fire broke out at a building in Chinatown where its acquisitions were stored. Credit...Lloyd Mitchell

Jan. 24, 2020

The 85,000 items, some dating to the 19th century, told the rich story of the Chinese migration to the United States: textiles, restaurant menus, handwritten letters, tickets for ship’s passage.

All of them could now be destroyed.

Officials at the Museum of Chinese in America said Friday evening that thousands of historic and artistic items it had carefully collected and curated over decades were most likely lost after a fire tore through a Chinatown building where most of its acquisitions were stored.

“One hundred percent of the museum’s collection, other than what is on view,” said Nancy Yao Maasbach, the president of the museum. She said that the collection was one of a kind and that she was “just distraught” after receiving the news.

The fire broke out Thursday night at 70 Mulberry Street, in a former school that educated generations of immigrants before becoming a cherished cultural landmark in the neighborhood. In addition to the museum’s storage, the building housed a senior center, the Chen Dance Center and a number of community groups.

The Museum of Chinese in America opened in its current location nearby on Centre Street, in a building designed by Maya Lin, in 2009. It had started nearly three decades before as the Chinatown History Project, and grew over time from a local project to a national one. Among the thousands of items in the collection believed to be lost is a document from 1883 about the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Other irreplaceable pieces included the carefully written letters of bachelors working in the United States to send money home “even though they didn’t live a full life because of discrimination,” said Ms. Maasbach; traditional wedding dresses from the early 1900s known as cheongsam; items brought by emigrants in suitcases that in some instances were later left anonymously outside the museum’s front door; and photographs from Chinatown in the 1980s.

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