As part of the Chinatown survey, Preservation Chicago staff and researchers sat down with Robert Hoy and Leslie Moy at the Preservation Chicago office. Over the course of the recorded conversation, they looked through historic photographs of the street and talked about their families, their childhoods and the neighborhood’s future.
Leslie Moy’s family has been in Chicago since his grandfather, Moy Dung Yee, arrived in 1878, when Chinatown was still at Clark Street and Van Buren Street. Robert Hoy is the grandson of Buck Hoy, remembered as Chinatown’s photographer, and his family later operated Won Kow, one of the neighborhood’s longest-running restaurants. Both marched as boys in Chinatown’s youth drum corps.
The five themes below gather what they shared. Each page links to the buildings it mentions on the survey map, and notes where a memory differs from the documentary record or has not yet been confirmed.
Five themes
Moving south: how the new Chinatown began
From Clark and Van Buren to Cermak and Wentworth, and the buildings remembered as being pulled back when 22nd Street was widened.
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Growing up in Chinatown
Three classrooms behind On Leong, the St. Therese bazaar, a drum corps that marched on LaSalle Street, and a pool hall with one house rule.
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Upstairs dining, gift shops and 300 buses
Second-floor banquet halls, invented dishes, almond cookies at 48 cents a dozen, and the Saturday waves of school tours.
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Unsung builders of Chinatown
A photographer, a benefactor, a broker-architect, a chop suey cook and a bandleader: people the narrators felt deserve to be remembered.
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Lost blocks and a living landmark
Expressways, a street extension that never came, an island neighborhood, and why the conversation turned to designation.
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