After the Smoke Clears, What Then for Devastated Chinatown Institutions?

Firefighters battled the blaze at 70 Mulberry Street through the night. Officials said the fire began on the fourth floor, then quickly spread to the fifth, then to the roof. Photo: FDNY

UPDATE 1/28/20 The de Blasio administration said in a statement that it has secured temporary sites for the displaced organizations housed in 70 Mulberry Street. "City agencies are continuing to work with the organizations on long-term options until the building can be rebuilt or restored," the statement said, adding that the city has offered to store recovered artifacts from the Museum of the Chinese in America in city-owned space "once recovery is completed."

Chinatown is reeling from the five-alarm blaze that has massively damaged 70 Mulberry Street, a neighborhood center of culture and community.

The fire, near Columbus Park, critically injured a 59-year-old man rescued from the building. Seven firefighters were treated for minor injuries.  

As late as Friday night, more than 24 hours after it began, the fire was yet to be officially deemed “under control” by the FDNY. Throughout the day on Friday firefighters continued to hose pockets of flames from a blaze that began around 8:45 p.m. on Thursday, as water cascaded through the building, hour after hour, seemingly leaving little in the structure unscathed.

Housed on the second floor of the 127-year-old, city-owned former school building are the archives of the Museum of Chinese in America, which contain more than 65,000 artifacts, memorabilia, documents, oral histories and art work, according to its web site.

“I could cry,” said Amy Chin, a genealogist and community activist who has worked in Chinatown most of her life. “This is such a loss of community history and resources. I use the archive quite a bit and there are materials there that are just irreplaceable. It’s a very unique archive.”

The museum’s president, Nancy Yao Maasbach, told The New York Times that conservators had been called in to store the precious items in freezer space before being told the building would not be open to them for weeks, dashing any hope that the collection could be saved. The museum said in a tweet that it had recovered back-ups of 35,000 objects from the collection that had been digitized. (A GoFundMe page has been set up for donations.)

Amy Chin said she has also worked with the 40-year-old Chen Dance Center, another 70 Mulberry tenant. H.T. Chen and his wife Dian Dong, she said, “have trained so many young children in modern dance, ballet and piano and they literally built their dance center from nothing. It’s their entire life. I hope they can recover from this.” 

Also in the building is the Chinese Planning Council’s senior center, where up to 300 people meet daily to socialize and be served lunch. “We are now working closely with these nonprofits, City Hall, NYPD, 5th Precinct, and FDNY to determine how and when these groups can access their spaces safely and soundly,” Councilwoman Margaret Chin said in a statement. “We are also beginning a dialogue to identify alternative spaces they can use in the interim.”

A job training program, Careers Made Possible, occupied the fourth and fifth floors. A youth program, United East Athletics Association, is also in the building.

“I know the neighborhood is in shock tonight,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Twitter. “We’re going to help the community get through this.”

The Department of Buildings said in a statement Friday evening that a preliminary inspection of the building showed no structural damage, but did not say when its full vacate order would be lifted.

Fire officials say the dramatic blaze broke out on the building’s fourth floor at about 8:45 Friday evening and quickly spread. “It went out of the fourth-floor windows into the fifth floor windows and quite rapidly [spread to] the roof of almost the entire structure. So it’s very heavily damaged,” said Fire Department Commissioner Daniel Nigro. About 145 firefighters responded to the scene.

“I heard a big explosion,” a witness told CBS New York. “Once I turned around I saw a flame coming out and I was shocked, as well as everyone else.”