After the Fire, a Chinatown Museum Sifts Through What Survived (original) (raw)
Art & Design|After the Fire, a Chinatown Museum Sifts Through What Survived
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/arts/design/chinatown-museum-fire-archives.html
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Families are celebrating hundreds of boxes of heirlooms that were unloaded from the scorched interior of 70 Mulberry Street.
On Jan. 23, a fire gutted the upper floors of 70 Mulberry Street. In March, workers unloaded more than 2,000 boxes of artifacts from the Museum of Chinese in America’s collection on the second floor.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
March 23, 2020
When a fire ripped through the upper floors of the red brick building that held the archives of the Museum of Chinese in America, the staff thought that all was lost.
The second floor of 70 Mulberry Street, a 130-year-old building that is a cherished cultural landmark in Chinatown, had been home to 85,000 items that helped tell the story of more than a century of Chinese-American history and culture. There were signs from long-shuttered Chinatown restaurants, traditional textiles, delicate paper sculptures and the jiapu, or genealogies, of families that document traditional Chinese names over decades.
The fire started on Jan. 23 at around 8 p.m. on the fourth floor, destroying the roof of the building but leaving the museum’s collection unburned. The archives were still in grave danger: Firefighters had pumped water into the building for more than 20 hours, and museum staff members were told that no one would be allowed to enter and retrieve the items for months, leaving them to deteriorate and grow mold.
The message that went out to the community was that tens of thousands of artifacts were likely to be lost.
Nancy Yao Maasbach, the president of the museum, received frantic calls and text messages from dozens of people whose family heirlooms had been donated to the collection. The museum — which is now based on Centre Street, just a short walk from the site of the fire — has been documenting Chinese-American history since it was founded in 1980 as the New York Chinatown History Project.
“There was a groundswell of mourning,” Ms. Maasbach said. “It was like 350 family legacies had died.”
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