How bad is the 7?

The 7, the purple express to the best food in Queens

The 7 wears the purple bullet, and it earns the color by being about as flashy as the subway gets. It starts at Flushing–Main Street deep in Queens, cuts west through some of the most densely packed blocks in the city, dives under the East River, and surfaces at 34th Street–Hudson Yards on Manhattan's far West Side. A rider who dozed through the last decade might not recognize the eastern end of this route, because the extension to Hudson Yards is the newest major subway stop the city has built in a long time, and it opened to give the line somewhere new to land. For a line long defined by its western reach, the new terminal handed it a purpose it had been missing.

A long stretch of the route rides up on elevated track, clattering past bedroom windows and over the streets of Long Island City, Sunnyside, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Corona, and Flushing. Most of the day the 7 is a local, but during the peak hours an express diamond appears and skips a run of stations, which feels like winning a small lottery if your stop made the cut. Get it right and you shave real time off the trip. Get it wrong and you stand there watching your train sail past.

Honestly, this is a food line. Jackson Heights, Corona, and Flushing rank among the best eating neighborhoods anywhere, and the 7 is the string that ties them to Midtown's offices. It also serves Mets–Willets Point, which puts you at the gate for Citi Field and the U.S. Open, and Court Square, the transfer that yanks riders onto the E and G. On the Manhattan side you get Times Square and Grand Central, so few routes connect the biggest job centers to such extraordinary dumplings, tacos, and momos within a single fare.

Transfers here are a workout. Court Square is a maze, and the walk between the 7 platform and the G is a daily cardio session for regulars. Queensboro Plaza forces a cross-platform scramble for the N and W and sits in a spot that is famously windy and cold. Downtown at Hudson Yards, the platforms are a long underground hike from anything else. And the express magic evaporates the instant rush hour ends, turning what was a quick ride home into a grinding local crawl through every stop in Queens.

Engineering buffs get a kick out of the East River crossing, which uses an old tunnel with tight curves that trains take slowly. Much of the elevated Queens structure is a survivor from the early twentieth century, a time when the line grew up to feed the great World's Fairs out in Flushing Meadows. That fair traffic is basically why the route pushes so far east in the first place. The Hudson Yards extension, decades later, closed the loop by giving the line a brand new anchor at the Manhattan end.

Crowding on the 7 is the stuff of local legend, worst in the peak direction at rush hour and on weekend evenings when half of Flushing seems to be heading home at once. Frequent trains soften the blow, and round-the-clock service softens it further. When the Mets play or the U.S. Open rolls around, Willets Point becomes a crush of humanity and the line does its level best. Late on a warm night, riding the elevated stretch with the city lights sliding by is genuinely one of the nicest views in the whole system.

So how does it stack up? The 7 is quick, frequent, and endlessly useful, and it wins on the strength of where it goes. Its faults are real: the express is unpredictable, the old tunnels are slow, and the transfers are tiring. But for a Queens rider pointed at Manhattan, the alternative is a bus, a car, and a parking space that does not exist. That is why the reputation holds. Catch it running express and you feel, for a few stops, like you beat the entire city. It is the kind of line you defend to friends who live on the other side of the city.