85,000 Pieces From Beloved Chinatown Museum Likely Destroyed in Fire

Her voice cracking, she said, “Let me tell you what we lost: The ticket for our family’s passage to America, from 1914, my grandfather’s oral history, my great-grandfather’s ID papers.”

“It is the only — the single most important — repository of New York’s Chinese community,” she said, noting that the museum, once a grass-roots effort, had assembled a history of a community that “larger institutions had tended to ignore.”

A spokesman for the city Buildings Department, Andrew Rudansky, said its inspectors had determined there was “significant interior fire damage” to the building and deemed it was not safe to occupy. The department did not issue a timeline for rescinding the order.

Nine firefighters and a 59-year-old man were injured in the blaze. The man was rescued from the fifth floor of the building and was reported to be in serious but stable condition, fire officials said. The firefighters sustained minor injuries.

The man told firefighters that no other people were inside, Thomas Richardson, the deputy chief of operations of the New York Fire Department, said during a news conference early Friday. The cause of the fire is under investigation.

As firefighters battling the fire sprayed the building with fire hoses, museum officials called in conservators and found freezer space, hoping they could salvage soaked items, according to Ms. Maasbach. But after receiving word that they would not be able to enter the building for weeks, hopes of saving the collection were dashed.

About 35,000 items in the collection had been digitized and those files were backed up, she said. On Friday evening, as water poured from the building, museum officials braced themselves to notify families who had donated items, artists and others of the destruction.