For the first time in more than two decades, New York City got a new subway station.

The station, at 34th ^{Street and 11th Avenue in Manhattan, opened to the public on Sunday afternoon when regularly scheduled No. 7 trains started rolling through. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority held a midmorning ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the $2.4 billion subway extension, which brings subway riders to the Far West Side.}

“This extension will benefit millions of New Yorkers in so many different ways,” said Thomas F. Prendergast, the authority’s chairman, before entering the station with Mayor Bill de Blasio and other officials. “It creates a vital transit link to the Far West Side and is expected to serve more than 27,000 customers each and every day.”

In a sprawling subway system that carries more than 5 million people around the city each day, the new stop is its 469th station. The official subway map has been updated with a purple branch extending west from Times Square toward the Hudson River.

After more than a decade of planning and a series of construction delays, riders finally got to use the sparkling station and three blocks of street-level parks. The station has a glass-shell entrance leading to a series of escalators, two colorful overhead mosaics and a pair of inclined elevators that are the first diagonal lifts in the subway system.

The station is notable for another reason: It is the first subway extension paid for by the city in more than 60 years. The Bloomberg administration agreed that the city would pay for the project as part of the Hudson Yards development.

It will bring riders to Hudson Yards — a cluster of residential buildings and office towers currently under construction — and to the newly renovated Jacob K. Javits Convention Center and the northern part of the High Line.

The 1.5-mile extension is expected to improve service for riders along the No. 7 line, which runs from Manhattan to Flushing in Queens, because, officials said, extra tracks were built south of the Hudson Yards station, giving the authority more room to store and turn around trains.

In a city where projects like the Second Avenue subway seem to drag on indefinitely, the opening of even a single stop can feel momentous. The authority’s president of capital construction, Michael Horodniceanu, said the Second Avenue subway, which is scheduled to open in December 2016, would come next.

“I feel very proud that we’ve completed the work,” Mr. Horodniceanu said on Friday as he prepared for the 7 extension opening. “We look forward to doing the same for Second Avenue, and we have about 15 months to go there. It’s a labor of love.”