As the story goes, it was the late seventies, and Jack Tchen and Charlie Lai began noticing all the old junk left out on the curb in New York’s Chinatown. It was left behind by the neighborhood’s old-timers as they passed away: luggage, clothing, personal papers, mementos. Many of them had come to America for work in the first half of the twentieth century, only to never make their way back home. They never imagined themselves as part of a history here; some were in denial that you could call this new place a home at all.
Tchen, a historian, and Lai, a community organizer, had met in the early seventies at the Basement Workshop, a Chinatown hub for activists and artists. Tchen was often frustrated by how hard it was to find the documents, photographs, and letters necessary to write a history of Chinatown. It turns out that many of these materials weren’t in libraries but in dumpsters. Tchen, Lai, and others began salvaging as much stuff as they could. The New York Chinatown History Project began at 44 East Broadway in 1980. Four years later, it moved to 70 Mulberry Street, taking up the second floor of a rickety old schoolhouse. In 2009, the newly renamed Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) relocated to a large, custom-designed space on Centre Street. The bulk of its collections stayed behind at the schoolhouse.
Last Thursday night, 70 Mulberry Street caught on fire, likely destroying much of the museum’s collection of some eighty-five thousand items. Besides the collection, the building, which was owned by the city, also houses a dance center, a senior citizens’ center, a vocational training office, and an athletics association. As of now, the cause of the fire remains unknown. Firefighters worked through the night to contain the damage. There were a few injuries, but nobody died. MOCA staffers kept a vigil, watching water pour through the building. They won’t be allowed back in for weeks, at which point most of the materials will likely be unsalvageable. Only about forty thousand items had been catalogued and digitized. Among the objects in danger of being lost: paper fans, books and magazines, photographs, printing blocks; old records, recital programs, and musical instruments; flyers announcing social services and open jobs; restaurant menus and signage; suitcases, cigarette cartons, old newspapers, immigration documents, and passports; film reels and lobby posters from legendary Chinatown theatres; irons, washboards, spool holders, and laundry tickets; wooden dolls, a plastic toy of a man being pulled in a rickshaw, opera costumes, silk jackets, embroidered slippers; a hand-painted T-shirt from a comedy troupe that only ever performed once.