People attend a watch party at 230 Fifth Rooftop Bar in New York City.
Photo: Andrew Kelly/Reuters
While a fair number of New Yorkers may be at home alone tonight, watching prestige-TV reruns and trying to enter a fugue state, plenty of us plan to lean into the misery (or joy) of watching the election results in numbers. Screaming and crying — better together! To capture the mood, we sent our reporters all over the city and asked for reader snapshots of their nights out, from the scene in front of Trump Tower to a Chelsea gallery’s highbrow version of a potluck. Here’s what we’re seeing so far.
Photo: Charlotte Klein
10:00 p.m.: The mood is ebullient at the New York Young Republican Club’s watch party in the East Village. MAGA hats were spilling onto the street for a smoke break.
Photo: Zach Schiffman
9:45 p.m.: Comedians Ella Yurman, Rebecca Weiser, Emily Wirth, Sydney Duncan, and Sheria Mattis on stage at the Late Stage Live event at Brooklyn Art Haus.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan
9:30 p.m.: At the top floor of a gutted townhouse turned events space on Crosby Street, the Reiki healer Adrienne White was offering compressed 15-minute sessions from a pillowed lounge she called “the cloud room.” Two stories down, the author Douglas Ruskoff preached to a crowd who had come to an event that sold itself as a “Quaker meeting” to “metabolize what we’re going through.” The venue he spoke at is CX, a members club that explains on placards throughout that it wants to help visitors “embrace …humanity in the age of the algorithm.” Still, it was impossible to avoid screens. MSNBC was projected onto a wall and a laptop showing the New York Times homepage was rigged to balance on a railing. Around 9:15, someone turned up the volume and Rachel Maddow’s voice rose above the chatter, warning that results would still be coming in all night. White will lead a group Reiki session shortly before the party ends at midnight. — Adriane Quinlan
At Singers, a bar in Bed-Stuy.
Photo: Zach Schiffman
9:30 p.m.: At Singers in Bed-Stuy, RuPaul is on the screen, then CNN, then CNN with the audio turned off.
The bar at Balthazar.
Photo: Kim Velsey
9:15 p.m.: At Balthazar, there are no TVs. Keith McNally is sitting at a table in the back at his laptop, receiving visitors.
Photo: Kim Velsey
8 p.m.: At a party thrown in a Soho loft by The Free Press, a professional, politically mixed crowd talked over McDonald’s Big Macs, cheeseburgers, and Brat cocktails. You could still hear yourself talking.
At Earth, a venue on the Lower East Side, Dean Kissick threw an election watch party.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan
7:34 p.m.: The writer Dean Kissick thought an election watch party should have pie — the most American of foods, and on the way to Earth, a venue he helps run on Orchard Street, he stopped at Petee’s. They had apple. Kissick, a Brit who recently moved back to London, has an outsider’s view on both American snack options and on the spectacle of the US election — a perspective he shares with the cofounders of Earth: the artists Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Annika Kuhlmann. For their election watch party, they plastered the windows of the white cube with oversized posters designed by the artist Richard Turley, hung an American flag they bought for a marathon Gertrude Stein reading, and lined chairs in front of a grid of 4 TV network screens projected on the wall under a swirling, pixelated US flag — a work of video art designed by Arthur Sillers, who was inspired by NBC’s Olympics coverage and wanted it to look like a “cacophony.” Outside a contrarian in a MAGA hat leaned against the glass, and the crowd, a mix of writers and artists, milled about, smoking. They included the sculptor Genevieve Goffman, the writer Christian Lorentzen, and the artist who goes by Glosso and showed up in costume: a T-shirt that showed Jesus rising above an eagle and an American flag. It was partly a joke, like the event itself, advertised as running from 6 p.m. “until it’s done.” “But we’re not going to be here for a week,” Sillers said. — Adriane Quinlan
A crowd spray-painting a Tesla Cybertruck in front of Trump Tower on election day.
Photo: Camilia Fateh
A Tesla Cybertruck parked outside of Trump Tower has become a canvas for Trump graffiti. The truck has been there all day, and the spray paint cans were provided by its owner, Dr. Boris Vitvitskiy, a physiatrist from Muncie, Indiana. Vitvitskiy is inviting onlookers to spray-paint his truck with messages in support of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Vitvitskiy says he has driven the truck across the United States to “show people what a Cybertruck is.” He bought the truck from a friend in Ohio and then stopped in Texas, California, Nevada, and Colorado. New York, on Election Day, is his final stop.
He urged people passing to sign the truck, saying, “If I leave and this truck isn’t destroyed with paint, I’ll be disappointed. It’s New York, you know.” A woman got into the truck and changed the music to play the theme song from Nickelodeon’s “Victorious.” A man who said he was from Italy brought over a bottle of Champagne, which Vitviskiy proceeded to chug. “Honestly, I think he’s the president of the world. He’s gonna bring the world together,” he said. — Camilia Fateh
Photo: Adriane Quinlan
5:17 p.m. Inside the cylindrical theater built for a Carrie Mae Weems show at Gladstone Gallery, the poet Terrence Hayes sat in front of a drum set and read from his book, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. The gallery was hosting an Election Day reading, organized by Precious Okoyomon, a poet who also works with food, which explained the free dinner she was cooking out front, a blue-chip version of a block party BBQ. Around sunset, the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija unveiled a paella with Nigerian and Thai flavors, a dish that fellow artist-chef Quori Theodor said was “kind of our election dish — the praxis of our lives.” An artsy crowd ate and sipped Modelos as the theater filled up, with the poet Anne Waldman looking on from stage left, Lynne Tillman perching on a low settee, and Padma Lakshmi in oversized aviators taking a spot by the door. The party goes until midnight. — Adriane Quinlan
Spotted in FiDi.
Photo: Brooke LaMantia
A truck owner drove their personal float through the Financial District.
