ARRIVING, AT LAST
Hudson Yard 7 station opens Sunday Many delays, $2.4B & 8 years
AFTER YEARS of stalled construction, ceremonial rides, and missed deadlines, New York City’s first new subway station in 25 years is finally on track to open Sunday.
By 1 p.m., once transit and city officials take the inaugural spin, the rest of the subway-riding public will be able to ride the rails along the 7 line into the glistening, modern station at W. 34th St. and 11th Ave.
The first trip will take place nearly two years after former Mayor Michael Bloomberg — whose administration funded the $2.4 billion project — took an unofficial ride to the station still under construction.
But there is excitement about a new life line to the far west side, a desolate piece of Manhattan that is being transformed amid a construction boom.
“Once the No. 7 (extension) was announced, that really accelerated development,” said Mitchell Moss, director of the New York University Rudin Center for Transportation. “The secret to creating housing is to build mass transit.”
The 1.5-mile extension of the 7 train from its current last stop at Times Square will bring a direct transit link to the Jacob Javits Center and the High Line. Businesses and restaurants have opened, and apartment buildings have cropped up in the burgeoning neighborhood.
New Yorkers heading west in Midtown have had to hoof it across long avenues from Eighth Ave. train stations. The new 34th St. stop is expected to handle 35,000 riders at its peak hour, according to the MTA.
“I actually moved here because it was opening here soon. And that was two years ago,” said Gus, a United Nations worker who lives in a 44-story building that went up in 2007.
Bo Zhao, 29, a finance worker, said he would use the new station, especially in the winter.
While he bikes or takes cabs from his apartment now, his friends have mentioned the long slog by foot.
“Sometimes, they comment that it’s quite far from the station,” he said.
These riders will be commuting from the first 21st century designed subway station.
“It’s a true station of the future — the first with incline elevators, air tempered platforms and other amenities that is the key piece to transit-oriented development on the far west side,” said MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz.
For the ribbon cutting ceremony, transit and city officials will ride a 7 train from the new 34th St.-Hudson Yards to Times Square-42nd St. Mayor de Blasio is expected to attend the ceremony, though Bloomberg will not be there due to a scheduling conflict, a spokeswoman for the former mayor said.
With construction starting in December 2007, the Hudson Yards station was expected to open in the summer of 2014. But problems with the elevator and testing of critical power and fire systems pushed off the big day.
Councilman Corey Johnson, a Democrat who represents the area, kept count of the MTA’s missed targets.
“It was enormously frustrating," he said.
Still, he’s eager to take the first trip out of Hudson Yards to Times Square.
He, like other transit experts, even talk about another station at W. 42nd St. and 10th Ave., an idea the Bloomberg administration cut from the original plan over funding constraints.
But that station can still be built, even if it will be more expensive in the future.
Dan Doctoroff, a deputy mayor under Bloomberg, said the second station would cause a spike in Manhattan construction, with new commercial space that could bring up to 100,000 rides a day to the stop.
“It would get a lot of use," he said “That would accelerate . . . development and it would relieve congestion.”