New York City

At the crack of dawn on Election Day, 44-year-old Aaron Cook headed to the polls in Bedford-Stuyvesant to vote for the first time.

“I didn’t think it was necessary,” Cook said. “I said ‘Why waste my time?’ But this time, I felt a little different. I felt maybe something could happen.”

With record numbers expected to vote in the presidential election, many Brooklynites showed up as the sun rose. Dozens joined Cook and as he lined up at the Cornerstone Sandy F. Ray Senior Housing Center.

“Getting up early this morning standing on line wasn’t a problem for me,” said Shara Martinez, 30, an Obama supporter and second-time voter. “I think it was a beautiful experience because I’m glad that we’re gonna get a president that can help [the country] and bring it back up to par where it once was before Bush came into office.”

Kanke Ikpi, 26, said that she was not bothered by the early morning. In fact, she said she had trouble sleeping Monday night because it felt like the day before Christmas.

“I’m really excited,” Ikpi said. “Hopefully, at the end of the day it goes the way I want it to go.”

Many voters shared her excitement as they exited the double doors of the senior center this morning.

“It’s been a very exciting, historical election for me,” said 18-year-old Terrell Johnson, a first- time voter who arrived at the center before it opened to voters at 6 a.m. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a while.”

“Obama! Obama!”

The chants and the beat of drums overwhelmed the Harlem State Office Plaza last night on 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. When CNN declared at about 11 p.m. that Barack Obama had won the presidency , the crowd erupted in a glorious, pulsing frenzy.

“We makin’ history tonight,” said Sharon Farley as she danced joyfully on a bench. “No sleep for us! We’re gonna celebrate all night!”

From Times Square to Bedford-Stuyvesant, to livingrooms to church basements to bars around the the city, New York marked the election of the country’s first African-American president with dancing, horn-honking, hollering and tears of joy.

But the biggest display of emotion came in Harlem, where thousands – including big name politicos like U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel and Gov. David Paterson – gathered in the plaza to watch the election returns on a loud jumbotron.

Eugene Rounds, 61, four Obama buttons on his lapel, took in the crowd, breaking into a wide smile. “I could not be more proud,” he said.

Rounds voted early in the morning and talked about how his 96-year-old mother followed him to the polls later. “She said, ‘God allowed me to be alive to see this change in America,’” he said.

On the other side of the plaza, Maxine Murrell gazed toward the TV screen, her eyes welling up. “This make me want to cry because my father used to be a poor man porter,” she said. “This means a lot. Just standing here. And I know I’m going to cry.”

Amidst the crowd, Anthony Fleming, a 20-year Harlem resident, carted out his store-bought life-size cut-out of Obama to the sidewalk across from the brand new neon-lit H & M Department Store.

“America’s on fire and we have to put the fire out,” said Fleming, who parked himself just beyond the frenzy, charging passersby $5 to have a shot with his cardboard Obama. “White or black. If we’re in the same neighborhood and your house is burning and my house is next to yours, I’ll bring you water.”

The magnitude of the moment — and its impact on the nation — didn’t escape a family standing nearby. Jose Perkins, 42, took in the scene with his daughter Nicole, 25, and his son Julian, 17.

“I can see the hope, because now my son can become president,” said Perkins.

Julian piped in, “I sure hope so.”

Dan Simon had a lot of work to do on Election Day.

But the Seven Stories Press publisher knew there wouldn’t be any progress on those 50 books that needed editing, marketing, designing or some other i-n-g. His mind, and the minds of his staff, were elsewhere.

When one of Simon’s part-time employees told him she was going to juggle her work schedule so she could help turn Quakertown, Penn. from a red town to a blue one on Election Day, he readily agreed. Three of her officemates thought that sounded like a great idea and decided to join her, especially since Simon was willing to give them the day off.

“I don’t think anyone would have been working,” said Veronica Liu, 30, production manager, while sitting shotgun on the road to Quakertown with two other co-workers.

A Precedent in Politics

For an election cycle where the nation’s souring economy has become today’s central issue, building it back up is largely a job that can wait until tomorrow. For today, at least, politics took precedence, even in workplaces. Some took extended lunch breaks to go vote or make calls for their candidate. Others “cyber slacked” at work, obsessively checking news updates on the Web.

And then there are people like Mysore Gandhi, 65, a researcher in cardiology for a children’s hospital in New Hyde Park, Long Island. With six months of unused vacation, Gandhi told his boss that he was going home on Election Day to “sit back and see the historic day.” He got a blank stare and several of his co-workers thought he was crazy. They reminded him there was a reason that polls stayed open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.

“I’m just relaxing on my chair, put on CNN and I’m soaking in the information,” he said around 4 p.m.

But Gandhi knows a lot rests on this election. He is worried about what opportunities there might be for his children and believes the country needs “change.”

A Powerful Force

For Gandhi and Simon’s employees, this election has proved there is a force out there larger than the daily grind. That’s what Greg DeLucia, 29 and Dan Connell, 29, both reality TV producers for “Wife Swap,” found out this week when an ABC executive sent them this email: “There’s only one thing more important than ‘Wife Swap,’ that’s voting.” They upped their boss by taking an extended lunch break to work at a phone bank for Barack Obama on Monday.

It turns out that it’s not only good company policy to allow people to take off work to vote — it’s the law. New York is one of 23 states that allow workers to leave the office for a period of time to vote on the company dime, according to Find Law. If an employee doesn’t have four consecutive non-working hours between polls opening and closing to vote, they are allowed two hours to skedaddle. That is, of course, as long as the employee makes the request between two and 10 days before Election Day.

But really, for those left at work, how much is actually getting done?

“I can tell you the water cooler is not confined to the water cooler,” said Grant Murphy, vice president for enterprise solutions at Secure Computing, which helps businesses filter Internet content. He said this election is not unlike the Olympics and March Madness, other periods when employee goofing on the Internet can cause real headaches for a company.

“If you have a large enterprise where you have several people doing ‘political research’ to see what McCain did on SNL, that really kills Internet bandwidth,” said Murphy. “The net effect is that Internet access will be impaired.”

Web Hits

Last election cycle, clicks on presidential websites were concentrated during business hours, according to comScore, Inc. A spokesman for the company said he didn’t know if that was the case this year. But the group did see that Obama’s website got 5.3 million unique hits in September, up 1,176 percent for the same period last year. Johnmccain.com got 2.9 million first time visitors.

Huffingtonpost.com, the most popular political blog and news site, saw unique traffic rise 474 percent for the month, compared to last year. Politico.com, the number two site, saw 344 percent more eyeballs this September than last.

But should employers block such sites?

“I don’t think companies should block news-related sites because of the many legitimate uses for news sites, and there’s a risk of harming employee morale by being overly restrictive,” said David Burt, a blogger at Filteringfacts.org, who used to work at Secure Computing and N2H2, another company that filters websites for clients.

Simon, the publisher, certainly won’t have to worry about that. Two thirds of his staff took the day off.

“I just feel too nervous about the election,” Simon, 50, said while driving to an Obama phone bank in the city on Tuesday. “I would be doing things that have nothing to do with what is going on in the world, which doesn’t feel right.”

Leon Vega, Jr., 42 and homeless, voted for the first time on Election Day. “I feel very American,” said Vega after leaving the voting booth. “I never voted before because I thought it would never make much of a difference. They always say your vote counts. Now I’m just finding out if that’s true.”

Vega lost his apartment three months ago after getting into what he described as “dire straits.” He now lives at the Bowery Mission, a shelter for homeless men on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His excitement over Barack Obama’s candidacy and his disappointment with the Republican Party led him to register for the first time last month.

Vega is one of some 20,000 voting-age adults in New York City’s shelters, said Lindsey Davis, a community organizer for the Coalition for the Homeless. Homeless citizens are eligible to vote, but many run into challenges while registering –chief among them the lack of a permanent address, said Davis. Another factor is a lack of knowledge about the registration process and deadlines.

“Homeless people often are happy to be registered,” she said. “The barrier isn’t people not being interested in voting.”

Many homeless people list the street where they sleep as their permanent address. Others use shelters, drop-centers, or social service offices to receive voter information. Vega is one of more than 30 Mission residents who registered to vote.

Another of those, Anthony Kravit, also voted Tuesday. Sixteen months ago, Kravit lived and worked in New Jersey. “I lost my job, I lost my apartment,” said Kravit, 36. “The last eight years Bush has been in here, it’s like they drained the middle class away.”