Jeffrey

JEFFREY MOY: A SECOND MAJOR DONOR TO THE CMF

Today Jeffrey Moy donated one-half of the $220,000-plus cost of the vacant lot(s) next to the CMF's building at 238 West 23rd Street.

Jeffrey is a third- and fourth-generation Chinese-American. On his father's side he is a grandson of Moy Dong Yee, the youngest of the three Moy brothers who founded Chicago's original Clark Street Chinatown in the 1870s. Jeffrey's father Samuel, born in 1909, was the second of the five sons (he appears in a 1912 picture included here in Historic Photos). An uncle, Samuel Moy's brother Wilson, came to be known as the "Unofficial Mayor of Chinatown."

On his mother's side, Jeffrey's grandmother, Ellen Lee, was a California-born lady from a family who worked on the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860s. Ellen married Toy Gow who owned a vegetable farm, a laundry, and an antique shop in St. Joseph and Benton Harbor, Michigan. Perhaps the first Chinese farmers in the Midwest, they supplied Chinese vegetables to Chicago's Chinatown for many years. The Toys sent their two daughters back to Toisan in Guangdong, China to be educated. Ruth Toy, the younger daugther, returned to Michigan in 1938 when she was 19. Later that year she and Jeffrey's father were married in Chicago.

Jeffrey himself is an expert in Chinese art and archaeology, and -- unlike most such experts -- has had a successful business career. In 1989 he bought the name and customer list of Paragon Books, a respected but moribund New York bookstore that specialized in oriental art books. Reestablishing Paragon on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, he built it into a much larger and more successful book seller and publisher than the New York original by focusing on mail order sales and soon on sales through the Internet. By now, in 2004, Paragon Book Gallery has come to be recognized by almost everyone as the best Asian art bookstore on this continent and one of the two or three best in the world.

Another of Jeffrey's business ventures was to buy, in 1998, the former Quong Yick building on Wesr 23rd Street in Chinatown. Earlier this year he agreed to sell the building to the Chinatown Museum Foundation. He sold it below market value and has subsequently made a substantial donation toward the CMF's building renovation fund. Now, with his donation of half the vacant lot, the CMF finds itself triply indebted to him.

We are most grateful.

Chuimei Ho (President) and Kim K. Tee (Treasurer)

26 August 2004