New York City's unusual new subway line

The entrance to Manhattan’s new 34th Street-Hudson Yards subway station. (Image: Metropolitan Transportation Authority)

It’s almost two years behind schedule, but New York City is about to cut the ribbon on a subway project that should prove to be a major benefit for business travelers attending conventions in the Big Apple– or visitors headed to the city’s burgeoning Far West Side including the High Line and Hudson Yards development.

It’s a mile-long extension of the Number 7 subway line that will allow conventioneers to zip underground to Manhattan’s huge Javits Center, sparing them an aggravating taxi (or Uber) ride in the city’s notorious crosstown traffic.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has set a September 13 start of service on the extension. The new 7 line runs east to west across midtown Manhattan along 42nd Street, with stops at Grand Central Station, Fifth Avenue and Times Square. The new extension will continue west from Times Square to 11th Avenue, then turn south to 34th Street and the Javits Center, where a new station — 80 feet underground — has been built.

The new station is called 34th Street-Hudson Yards. Besides the convention center, it will also serve the eventual residents of the huge Hudson Yards residential project that is going up nearby. The Number 7 extension is the first new subway line to open in New York since 1989.

So what’s so unusual about this new line? If you’ve ever sweltered in a New York underground subway station during the odiferous dog days of summer, here’s a real bonus: The new 34th Street–Hudson Yards station is the first one in the entire system to be climate-controlled. Ahhhh.