NEW YORK — The city’s first new subway station in a quarter-century opened Sunday, linking Times Square to a booming neighborhood on Manhattan’s far West Side at 34th Street.
‘‘This is really a monumental day for the city,’’ Mayor Bill de Blasio told hundreds of guests at the inauguration for the gleaming No. 7 station that’s part of the transformation of a once-desolate industrial area.
The extension is expected to bring more than 30,000 riders a day to a neighborhood where construction is underway for the 50 million-square-foot Hudson Yards complex of office towers and residential high-rises. The complex includes about 17 million square feet of office, residential, and hotel space on the former site of rail yards.
The mayor called the neighborhood ‘‘a whole new city being created within our city, connected with thousands of jobs.’’
A short walk away is the popular High Line elevated park, which was built on defunct rail tracks.
The $2.4 billion extension was funded by the city under de Blasio’s predecessor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It’s the 469th station in a subway system that carries more than 5 million people a day.
The station is the first in the subway system to have elevators that travel on an incline like escalators do.