Postcard from... New York

Work crews are scrambling underneath New York City to finish the city’s first major new subway stop in 25 years, a fast-track project intended to revitalise a long-neglected slice of Manhattan.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) has been working for seven years on the $2.4bn (£1.5bn) extension of the Number 7 subway line. The line will extend far west to 11th Avenue in Manhattan, a rundown neighbourhood long known as Hell’s Kitchen – completion is expected in April 2015. The new station is intended to be the linchpin of the Hudson Yards development, with more than a dozen skyscrapers, a cultural centre and parks. The station is expected to see 200,000 passengers daily by 2025.

To extend the line, the MTA bored a 1.5-mile tunnel from West 26th Street and 11th Avenue to Times Square. The new station could draw in new residents and businesses in the way a decision a century ago to bury a surface rail line north from Grand Central Terminal changed that area – Park Avenue, now synonymous with luxury.

“This is the equivalent,” Mitchell Moss, professor of urban planning at New York University said. “We’re taking an area that people avoided, and making it an area that people want to go to.” REUTERS