Left Homeless by Fire, Chinatown Groups Struggle to Regain Their Lives

A volunteer for the Museum of Chinese in America documents boxes from the museum's collection that had been removed from the second floor of 70 Mulberry Street on Jan. 29. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Nancy Yao Maasbach, president of the Museum of Chinese in America, had feared the worst for her institution’s 85,000 irreplaceable documents and artifacts stored in fire-ravaged 70 Mulberry Street. But now, standing across the street from the charred and water-soaked building, a hub of Chinatown culture and community, she was smiling with relief.

“I cannot tell you the expression of surprise and delight when we were opening boxes this morning,” she said at a Wednesday press briefing on the status of the building’s non-profit tenants. “It looks like everything we took out of the building this morning is very much salvageable.”

That morning, workers for the first time were able to enter the building’s second floor where they removed some 200 storage boxes—a small fraction of the collection—to waiting trucks that, in turn, transported them to a storage room at the nearby museum on Centre Street. There, some 25 volunteers in protective garb, examined, sorted and re-boxed many of them. Maasbach said 25 boxes were sent to conservators in Allentown, PA., where “they will be immediately frozen, stabilized and then freeze-dried.”

Just how long it will take to rescue the rest of the archives remained unknown. At noon the work had been halted, reportedly the result of asbestos in the building. (Update: More items would continue to be retrieved in the following days but with the bulk of the material remaining due to safety concerns.)

On Thursday evening, Jan. 23, fire broke out on the building’s fourth floor and quickly spread to the fifth floor and the roof. One person in the building was critically injured and seven firefighters had minor injuries. Firefighters continued to hose stubborn flames in the building for days, seemingly leaving little in the structure untouched by the deluge.  

“So many of us are still in shock and wondering what’s going to happen next,” said Councilwoman Margaret Chin, who brought together the heads of the impacted organizations and representatives of the responding city agencies for the briefing. 

Since the fire, Chin’s office and city officials have been scrambling to find temporary space for the non-profit groups housed in the city-owned building. For now, the 300 seniors who have been coming to the Chinese American Planning Council’s senior center for lunch and other services can go to the CPC’s other senior center on Grand Street, a “good temporary solution,” said the organization’s president Wayne Ho. The H.T. Chen Dance Center, housed in the building for 40 years, is moving its offices to another city building but is still looking for studio space. The center serves 500 local children and hosts cultural education programs for thousands of city-wide students. “We are determined to restore our programming as soon as possible,” said Dian Dong, who heads the education program.

Other affected organizations include United East Athletics Association, a youth program that was offered costume storage and rehearsal space for its Lunar New Year lion dancers by nearby DCTV and temporary space for programming in the Municipal Building. Careers Made Possible (formerly the Chinatown Manpower Project), a job training and small business assistance program, will temporarily relocate to a community room at the Chung Pak Daycare Center and, on weekends, in P.S. 130.

“We cannot lose this gem in our community,” Chin said of the 127-year-old former school building. “So we will work very hard to rebuild.”

But a Department of Buildings official, who has inspected the structure, was uncertain about the survival of 70 Mulberry Street. “There is significant and severe fire damage to the building,” said DOB Assistant Commissioner Yegal Shamash. ”The structural stability of the building right now is not in jeopardy but overall we do have concerns about the stability of the building long term.”

Asked if he thought the entire structure may have to be demolished, he replied, “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. That’s what our engineers have been looking at and that’s why they’re here on a daily basis.”