22:09

As the protesters who had marched all the way from Union Square – some 35 blocks downtown – continued past Trump Tower, a comparatively smaller crowd still numbering in the thousands congregated in front of the president-elect’s building.

“Fuck your tower! Fuck your wall!” the crowd chanted at Trump Tower’s brass-escutcheoned facade, as scores of NYPD officers manned hastily-erected barricades, behind which stood eight department of sanitation trucks filled with dirt.

Nina, a forty-something actor who lives in Manhattan, told the Guardian that the protest felt less like a call-to-arms than a vigil for the promise of America.

“I’m distraught at the decision,” said Nina, who declined to share her surname for professional reasons. “He’s a dangerous man – he’s a hothead, a megalomaniac.

“It just feels like he’s doesn’t truly have our best wishes at heart.”

She was too stunned by the election results to even muster anger, she said. “I never thought it was possible; it truly didn’t seem possible. I’m embarrassed for America.”

Asked by the Guardian what she wanted out of tonight’s protest, Nina said: “I’d like them to reverse the frikken’ decision! But that’s obviously not going to happen … The compunction was just to lend my voice, lend my body.

“I just felt helpless. He’s a horrible, horrible man, not the leader of the America I live in. Or the America I thought I lived in.”

Nina said that Trump, who is as part of the cultural fabric of New York as street meat and subway rats, is an affront to the spirit and soul of the most diverse city in the world.

“I like humanity, I like mankind – it’s why I like being a New Yorker,” she said. “Are we really going back to where we thought there were people who were lesser or better? That just feels tragic – for us and for them and for the world.”