Stories From The Stacks

In 1968, the New York Stock Exchange drowned in a sea of paperwork, which forced it to close to trading for one day every week. Something had to be done to allow the finite space of the trading floor to serve the potentially infinite growth in trade volume. The automation of securities trading, the replacement of open outcry pits and paperwork with electronic infrastructure, gained momentum as exchanges competed to be bigger, faster, and more secure than rivals. In this episode of Stories from the Stacks, urban historian Aaron Shkuda, project manager of the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, & the Humanities, discusses his research into the ways securities exchanges in New York and Chicago met the spatial challenges of their mid-twentieth century growth. Shkuda focuses on the relationship between exchange, back office functions, and the urban fabric in which they are embedded, which drew numerous stakeholders into the discussion of market expansion and automation. Using Hagley Library