Conceived nearly a century ago, the line became Governor Cuomo’s obsession. Illustration by Ben Wiseman

New Yorkers view their subway system with reproachful pride. We fixate on its virtues and faults, as though the subway lines were our children. We want so much for them, and yet they so often disappoint. When their latest report cards arrived, just after Christmas, the top grades went to the 1 line, the 7, and the L. The goats were the 5 and the A. The A train at least has an anthem, and the vestigial grandeur of connecting old Harlem to Bed-Stuy. The 5, ode-less, has passengers massed five deep on the platform, with herders in fluorescent vests blowing whistles and barking out commands (“Let the people off the train first!”) and riders adding their own gloss (“If you don’t fit, get out the fucking train!”). Along with the 4, it provides express service up and down Lexington Avenue. It also provides the routine rush-hour humiliation of getting stalled between stations as the 6, the Lexington Avenue local, rattles past on a parallel track. The Lex line carries more riders per day—1.3 million—than any other train in the United States. You tend not to look around much on a crowded car, but when you do you will typically see, on faces pointing every which way and often rearing back to avoid backpacks or arms thrusting up toward grab handles, a portraitist’s range of had-it-up-to-here.

The subway-line rankings, based on such categories as cleanliness, crowding, and frequency of service, come from the Straphangers Campaign, a project underwritten by the New York Public Interest Research Group. Straphangers also issues year-end top-ten worst and best lists. By its lights, the tenth worst public-transportation event in 2016 was the release, by a performance artist aboard the D train, of a box of live crickets, which caused another passenger to pull the emergency brake, stranding the train for half an hour on the Manhattan Bridge. Considerably worse were spikes in both hate crimes and air-conditioning failures, record system-wide overcrowding, the looming shutdown of the indispensable L train, and—salt in the wound—a fare hike, effective next month. The ten-best list was perhaps harder to pull together, there being a shallower pool. Hats off to more Wi-Fi service and countdown clocks, and a fleet of newly designed cars. Top of the list, however, was momentous, and a bit of a no-brainer: the début of the Second Avenue subway, which opened to great fanfare at noon on New Year’s Day—ninety-seven years after it was first conceived.

The line’s notorious state of non-fruition had made it a perennial punch line, a home-town Godot, shorthand for decades of public-works failure. And so its completion—on time and on budget, by some metrics; anything but, by others—was a cause for celebration, self-congratulation, and heavy Instagramification. It is the biggest addition to the New York City subway system in several generations. Certain subsets—Upper East Siders, transit geeks, the Times—treated its arrival like the moon landing.

Still, this Second Avenue subway is just a stunted version of the one that was originally envisaged. It consists of only three new stations and two miles of new track, running from a new platform deep in a preëxisting station under Lexington Avenue at Sixty-third Street, east to Second Avenue, and then north to new stops at Seventy-second, Eighty-sixth, and Ninety-sixth. This is the terminus of Phase I. The projection is that the Second Avenue line will convey two hundred thousand passengers a day, most of them fugitives from the 4/5/6. Phase II, which would extend the line another mile and a half north, to 125th Street, is supposed to begin in two years, but only a fraction has been funded, and there’s no time frame for laying track. As for Phases III and IV, which would extend the line downtown, to lower Manhattan, those are probably decades away. (The Trump Administration, as it happens, has included all this on its infrastructure wish list.) For now, though, this Second Avenue subway is really just an extension of an existing line—the Broadway express known as the Q. It’s an appendix, or, as some have said, a stub-way. Call it the Q tip.

And yet reasonable people everywhere—depending on your definitions of reasonable and everywhere—seem to agree that what we need now, most of all, from our government at every level is heavy investment in new infrastructure. Here, for our delectation, was an unlikely gleaming specimen, a municipal unicorn. Run and see.

That first morning of 2017, a crowd of citizens gathered at the station entrance on the southwest corner of Ninety-sixth Street and Second Avenue. There’d been a few open houses in the stations the previous week and an invitation-only train party the night before, at which political dignitaries and some of the workers who’d got the thing done drank New York State sparkling wine and took an inaugural ride. But this was the line’s first go as public transit. Just before noon, Governor Andrew Cuomo, who in recent months had made its completion an obsession and a point of pride, spoke briefly, and then the barricades came down, a cheer went up, and the crowd, phones aloft, streamed onto an escalator and a stairway. Downstairs, transit workers waved them through the turnstiles (a free ride, no less) and down one more flight to an immaculate platform and a waiting train, which was not itself new but which was covered, inside and out, with art work and advertising celebrating the new line. In the space formerly reserved for Dr. Zizmor and Invisalign, there was testimony from forgiving Second Avenue residents and business owners, who had been so notoriously inconvenienced during the new line’s near-decade of construction. (“We’ve been anxiously awaiting this to open,” Zen Master Samu Sunim declared. “It feels great.”) The mood aboard was giddy, too. Rounds of cheers greeted the routine recorded announcement (“Stand clear of the closing doors, please”), the first hint of movement (Euro-smooth, not lurching), and, finally, the remarks over the public-address system from Governor Cuomo, who was up front in the engineer’s booth (“Rest assured, I am not driving the train”).

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Another crowd was waiting to board at Eighty-sixth Street, and then at Seventy-second Street. Elation gave way to humdrum—just another subway ride, after all. Nonetheless, many passengers got off at Sixty-third Street to have a look around the new platform and then ride the next Q back uptown. Those boarding a car in the middle of the train encountered a transient passed out across the seats, a coat over his head and, on the floor next to him, a mess of chicken and rice spilling from a partially crushed Styrofoam clamshell. Ten minutes in, and the city had asserted itself. The passengers, maintaining what they deemed a safe distance, made buoyantly cynical remarks—“Wow! Already?”—and snapped a few photos on their phones. A rider who’d got on at Coney Island said to them, “That’s not his food. He got on in midtown. Food’s been here since Brooklyn.”

For the next several hours, people rode up and down, stopping in at the stations, wandering at a snow-day pace, often reëncountering each other on intersecting orbits. Smiles, hugs, tears, a reawakened attunement to the marvels of the city and its skunkworks—not the usual nostalgic pride, the pining for Fishbowl buses and Checker cabs, but a kind of municipal mindfulness. It was the happiest New Yorkers had looked in months.