NEW YORK — Gov. Kathy Hochul, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Adriano Espaillat joined MTA officials in East Harlem Monday morning to break ground on what will be the launch site for a pair of tunnel boring machines that should ultimately extend the long-promised Second Avenue subway line.

“Nearly a century after false starts and broken promises, today we finally break ground on a dream that’s 100 years in the making,” Hochul said, standing on a temporary plywood dais in a patch of dirt at the corner of East 120th Street and Second Avenue.

To her left, cordoned off with traffic cones and yellow chains, sat a shallow pit — the start of a shaft that will be used to launch a pair of specialized digging machines when they arrive from Germany. Officials say that will happen early next year.

The work is the latest piece of progress on what is officially known as Second Avenue Subway Phase 2. The plan will extend the current Second Avenue Line, made up of the three northernmost stops on the Q train, with three additional stops up the East Side and into East Harlem, where it will connect to the current 125th St. station on the Lexington Line.

The work — for which a joint venture of firms Halmar International and FCC Construction will be paid nearly $2 billion to complete — is expected to take about four years.

“This is not your average Lego set, folks,” MTA chairman Janno Lieber said. “What we’re going to do is build a shaft where we can lower these two million-and-a-half-pound beasts, the tunnel boring machines, into position.”

The borers, currently being built in Germany, are due in New York in the first quarter of 2027.

The Second Avenue Subway, long delayed, has become a classic New York punchline — as impossible to complete as the Brooklyn Bridge is to purchase.

An October 28, 1972 edition of this newspaper declared that date “The day the Second Avenue Subway Started for Real,” alongside a photograph of then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller at a similar groundbreaking on E. 103rd St.

That was before New York’s fiscal crisis put the project on ice for decades. Efforts to revive the project resulted in “phase 1” of the line — a three-station northward extension of the Q train that ends at 96th St.

Phase 2 has become newly embattled, with President Donald Trump cutting off federal funding, ostensibly over hiring practices but timed to reflect his disdain for the Empire State’s Democratic congressional leadership during last fall’s government shutdown. The president also cut funding from the Hudson River Tunnel project around the same time late last year

Hochul waved off any notion that Monday’s groundbreaking would suffer a similar fate to Rockefeller’s.

“The stars have aligned,” she said. “We had a lot of supply chain issues during the pandemic, we now have Donald Trump trying to get in our way, but we’re here today and it’s going to happen.”

“Let me have a chance to show what I’m capable of as someone who believes in transit, who believes in transit equity,” she told the Daily News. “Communities that have been underserved for so long, watching success go elsewhere? That era is over.”

Once Phase 2 is completed — it is scheduled to go into service in 2032 — Hochul and MTA leadership plans to keep the massive tunneling machines in the ground to continue digging an additional phase that would bring the subway across Manhattan under 125th Street.

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