Some 85,000 historic artifacts that tell the story of Chinese migration to the United States probably have been lost in a fire that swept through a building in Manhattan's Chinatown that housed the archives for the Museum of Chinese in America, a museum executive said.

The fire on Thursday night on the eve of the Chinese Lunar New Year at a former school at 70 Mulberry street. It housed the artifacts of the museum known as MOCA, which is nearby.

The cause of the fire is under investigation.

Fire department officials said someone noted the fire at about 8:45 pm. It started on the fourth floor of the building, spread to the fifth floor and then the roof area.

Officials said a 59-year-old man was trapped on the top floor, and they had to use ladder trucks to pull him from the building. He suffered smoke inhalation as did nine firefighters.

The fire didn't appear to send flames into the museum's second-floor storage area, but damage from water sprayed on upper floors could be irreparable, said Nancy Yao Maasbach, the museum's president.

She said that the building had been declared unstable by the fire department and she was told that no one will be able to enter it to retrieve items for at least three weeks.

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

She said the museum's artifacts, which include textiles, restaurant menus and tickets for ship's passage, will be irreparably damaged by then.

The museum used its portion of the building to store donated collections of Chinatown postcards, Chinese American newspapers, family albums, documents about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and letters home from lonely bachelor immigrants, Maasbach said.

She said that said the building held ``one hundred percent of the museum's collection, other than what is on view. It's devastating for us''.

"It's priceless," she said. "I think the most painful part is that these are families who trusted us with their collections."

Ava Chin, a writer who teaches at the City University of New York College of Staten Island, told The New York Times that the fire `was `devastating for the community and families like my own''.

"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," she said.

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

On Friday, Mayor Bill de Blasio visited the building, which the city owns, and described it on Twitter as a "pillar" of the community.

"I know the neighborhood is in shock," de Blasio said. "We're going to help the community get through this."

The 40-year-old museum is on Centre street, a few blocks from the burned building. It often used copies of documents and artifacts in its exhibits to keep the originals safe at 70 Mulberry, Maasbach said.

About 35,000 items in the collection had been digitized and those files were backed up, she said.

MOCA is in a building designed by Maya Lin, in 2009. She also designed the Vietnam war memorial in Washington.

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