Category: Blog Post

In the evening hours of January 24th, one day before the Lunar (Chinese) New Year,a five-alarm fire ripped through the building housing the archives of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA NYC) on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown. It took eleven hours for firefighters to control the flames. Thankfully, no lives were lost. While the fire did not reach the precious artifacts housed at the site, the water from the fire hoses did. The damage to the collection which features items from Chinese-American history not found elsewhere is catastrophic. Estimates put the number of lost artifacts, spanning 160 years of history, at 85,000. As the flames consumed the building and the water came pouring down our hearts were flooded with sorrow for our colleagues at MOCA NYC. After all, a museum’s collection is the museum. Archives such as the ones housed at MOCA—and to a large extent at Westport Museum (WM)—are remarkable for the glimpse they offer into overlooked people whose everyday lives are the real foundation of our collective national story. When terrible disasters like these strike it’s human nature to take stock of our own affairs. That is true for individuals and for organizations: You ask yourself whether you are doing all you can to prevent the unthinkable. MOCA NYC thought it had done just that. Following best practices, the museum’s archives and collections were housed on secured, upper floors. On the contrary, Westport Museums’s own archival vault was placed below grade when it was installed decades ago. This has caused persistent concerns about temperature and humidity control. While 70 Mulberry is a 120 year old building, renovation presumably made it stable enough to withstand the weight of such a large trove of objects and papers. Conversely, WM’s costumes collection weighing many tons was housed in a …

On New Year’s Day in 1935, American reporter Sigrid Schultz witnessed raucous celebrations in Germany’s Black Forest. Shooting rifles into the air, the members of the fast-rising National Socialist party celebrated their leader’s rising hegemony over the German political landscape. Their leader was Adolf Hitler and they were Nazis. Schultz recorded all she saw and sent it via telegram to her editor at The Chicago Tribune: “…year two of Hitler’s Fuehrer Germany finds Germany comparable to a mass of cooling lava after a volcano eruption with some people getting burned and nobody certain where the lava will finally settle…” Schultz had been the Chicago Tribune’s Central Europe Bureau chief for nearly ten years by that time—the first woman to hold the post in a major news organization. Her reputation for fair and fact-based reporting had gained her the trust of Hermann Göring, the man who would be Hitler’s second in command. It helped that she was a trained chef and gracious hostess who held dinner parties that lured her subjects and gained their trust. From this position of access, the journalist was to get inside information in order to report—and forewarn—of the Third Reich’s insatiable hunger for power and unquenchable thirst for violence that led, ultimately, to the Holocaust. It was nothing short of remarkable that an American woman was allowed entry into the inner sanctum of the Nazi party. Sigrid Schultz had been born in Chicago and emigrated to Paris with her family at eight years old because her father, a Norwegian immigrant and an artist, had secured several commissions there. Her parents separated within a year and Schultz later wrote in an affidavit explaining her foreign residence that she only saw her father three more times. Her mother continued to live with her in Germany. Demonstrating a natural …