One glance at the 205th Street station on the D line Thursday morning and you might think, case closed, the mayor has it right. The governor is too much in love with frills, not the unsexy nuts and bolts of keeping up the subway system.

Yellow caution tape blocked parts of the platform. Cladding on girders was crumbling. A water leak has mapped itself along the tile walls in rust brown lines.

It is as if the place is melting.

You could look at that mess, and think, no wonder Mayor Bill de Blasio said, “We’re going to continue to make the point that we don’t like the direction the M.T.A. is taking, and we’re going to be speaking up about it. The countdown clocks and the Wi-Fi and painting, having lights on bridges — all that stuff doesn’t matter compared to your subway actually arriving where it’s supposed to arrive on time.”

But what if the exact opposite is true?

What if the problem is that our subway stations and all our infrastructure are not treated as public treasures, and are instead too utilitarian, too trampled, so purposefully unpleasant that no one cares when things are going wrong until the whole place starts falling down?