For immediate release:

Contact:
Kristin Aguilera
Museum of American Financial History
Communications Director
212-908-4695
kaguilera@financialhistory.org

WALL STREET TOWN MEETING TO ADDRESSS FUTURE OF NEW YORK CITY'S FINANCIAL DISTRICT
Museum forum will examine endurance and optimism in the culture of Wall Street

Financial District, New York City - The Museum of American Financial History, in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution, will host on Thursday, November 15 the first public forum in lower Manhattan to address the future of New York City's Financial District in the historical context of the hopeful, resilient, forward-looking culture of Wall Street.

The program will run from 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm.

"Our role today is to offer a platform and a context to help our community collect its emotions, and to draw strength from our shared history," says the Museum's Executive Director Brian Thompson. "Collecting artifacts will come later."

The town meeting, moderated by CNN senior financial editor Myron Kandel, will take place in the auditorium of the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, home to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center.

Participants will include Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small as well as individuals and institutions who took part in the depiction of Wall Street at the 2001 Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, DC. The financial museum helped organize this interactive portrayal of worklife on Wall Street, which was seen by over a million visitors.

"Wall Street is more than a trading venue," says Dr. Nancy Groce, a curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. "From the late 18th century, when New Yorkers founded an exchange in the shade of a buttonwood tree, to today's technologically sophisticated trading floors, the heart of Wall Street has always been its people -- generations of financial workers who have established and maintained a culture and community all their own."

The Museum of American Financial History, an Affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, is the nation's only independent public museum dedicated to the "American Dream" story of opportunity and entrepreneurship in our democratic free market economy. Its current exhibition on J.P. Morgan was curated by biographer Jean Strouse, who was selected to a receive a MacArthur Foundation award earlier this month.