![]() MOCA staffers kept a vigil, watching water pour through the building. There were a few injuries, but nobody died. Firefighters worked through the night to contain the damage. As of now, the cause of the fire remains unknown. 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. Last Thursday night, 70 Mulberry Street caught on fire, likely destroying much of the museum’s collection of some eighty-five thousand items. The bulk of its collections stayed behind at the schoolhouse. In 2009, the newly renamed Museum of Chinese in America ( MOCA) relocated to a large, custom-designed space on Centre Street. Four years later, it moved to 70 Mulberry Street, taking up the second floor of a rickety old schoolhouse. The New York Chinatown History Project began at 44 East Broadway in 1980. Tchen, Lai, and others began salvaging as much stuff as they could. It turns out that many of these materials weren’t in libraries but in dumpsters. Tchen was often frustrated by how hard it was to find the documents, photographs, and letters necessary to write a history of Chinatown. 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. 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. 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. It was left behind by the neighborhood’s old-timers as they passed away: luggage, clothing, personal papers, mementos. 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.
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