The New York City program will feature major areas on the crafts and traditions of backstage broadway; Wall Street and the financial industries; urban sports and street games; the fashion industry; mass transit including subways, buses, and taxis; street parades and festivals including representatives of Caribbean Carnival and Italian Giglio festivals; street art - including a few of the City’s most famous “muralists”; neighborhood and community groups; and, of course, a major foodways section.

In addition to the Main Stage and a stellar line-up of evening concerts, there will be a Community Cultural Initiative Stage (produced in cooperation with New York’s legendary Center for Traditional Music and Dance – formerly the Ethnic Folk Arts Center) featuring high-octane music and dance workshops, a Broadway Stage featuring musical theater traditions, and a Club Stage, featuring some of the best of New York’s folk revivalists and singer-songwriters, rappers, and spoken word artists.

The Festival will highlight New York as New Yorkers see it: both a giant city and a community made up of multiple, overlapping communities – ethnic, geographic, and occupational. Some of the participants will be internationally renowned artists or institutions (e.g., Amateur Night at the Apollo); others are locally celebrated tradition bearers (e.g., the Rosenwach Company, which has been enhancing the city’s skyline by building New York’s famous water tanks for more than 100 years). The invited artists, experts, and performers will share one thing: they add to the richness and diversity that make New York unique.

The Festival is the culmination of a multi-faceted project to research and document life in New York City at the turn of the millennium. In addition to celebrating New York City on the Mall, pre- and post-Festival conferences, panel discussions, and presentations are planned for New York City, and a multi-part CD series on the ethnic musics of New York will be released by Smithsonian Folkways beginning in spring 2001.