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Moca museum restaurant6/18/2023 Admittedly, I am a pack rat who, until recently, kept a folder of my family’s old phone bills from 1985. I co-curated “The Moon Represents My Heart,” a show about music and the Chinese-immigrant experience, at MOCA last year, and, when we were gathering materials, I was genuinely shocked at how difficult it was to locate good ephemera-family photos of recitals, old mixtapes or concert T-shirts, ticket stubs. Every new generation contributes to the collection in their own way. Now to call it Chinese sounds monolithic and strange. Now they settle first in Sunset Park or Flushing or Elmhurst, not Manhattan. Now they’re young, middle-class college students, not old laundry workers. Now they’re from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and not the mainland. These immigrants came for the railroads, or to run laundries and restaurants, and now they’re engineers. Even the meaning of who is centered in the “Chinese in America” part shifts over time. The museum’s name changes and the staff turns over, the mandate evolves. 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.Īs Nancy Bulalacao, who formerly worked as the museum’s director of public programs, wrote on Instagram, the heart of MOCA has always been its collection. Only about forty thousand items had been catalogued and digitized. They won’t be allowed back in for weeks, at which point most of the materials will likely be unsalvageable. 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. >Īmerican Legion Post 125 Reception for.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. ![]() >ĭerelict Plane Removed From North Adams. >īirge Halts Family Shelter Proposal at MCLA >ĭA Says Kelsie Cote Killed Grandmother. Robert Moulton Jr., Civic & EMS Leader, Dies. If you would like to contribute information on this blog, e-mail us at CommentsĬondemned North Adams Apartment Building. All comments are reviewed before posting and will be deleted or edited as necessary. Name-calling, personal attacks, libel, slander or foul language is not allowed.
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