"There was a time when black men and women, no matter how old, were called boy and girl, and had to give up their seats on the bus for our white brothers and sisters. Now we got one riding in Air Force One."

At Ira's church the next morning, the pastor runs through a modern history of American racial oppression, punctuated by the refrain, "and He was there all the time. Because of what happened yesterday - yes we can!" Ira himself seems too emotional to do much singing. He stands to the side of the choir, bristling, and holding back tears. Around the corner, on 125th Street, people pass each other with greetings like "It's an Obama day". One old black man, speaking to another, passes out of earshot in mid-sentence: "It's been a long time. It's been a very long time. It's been a long, long time since I've been proud to be..."

Later, in the elegant smoking-garden of another nightclub, this one in the fashionable meat-packing district, I talk to another bouncer, another Mel. This Mel is black, but is not at all romantic about Obama. Foremost on his mind is money and the amount he pays in taxes, but he then launches into a long, YouTube-researched tirade about the unfair influence of the Rothschild family. I wonder how, without seeming to care about a black president, he manages to reconcile these two concerns.

Thursday isn't much of an Obama day. I walk all over town before catching my night flight, but apart from the newspapers, and the odd poster still in its window, I see no visible trace of the election. The city is coming to terms with the anti-climactic prospect of another three months of George W. Bush, but there is an ambiguous energy in the air. Perhaps it is biding its time, quietly assured of a bold new future under Obama; perhaps it is slightly in shock, and hasn't quite figured out what to do next.