Opinion

Hollowed ground

The south pool waterfall with the Freedom Tower in the background is shown as work continues on the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center site in New York. (Getty Images)

Seven years since its design was unveiled, and $700 million in public and private funding later, the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum is at last upon us. Following today’s ceremony exclusively for victims’ families, part of the site will open to everyone starting tomorrow with an online reservations-only policy.

I howled over the Memorial plan in 2004 and 2005: “It stinks.” I recoiled from its “morbidity, “open storm drains,” and “earth-hogging mediocrity.” The design seemed to ignore that 9/11 was defined by selflessness and heroism as well as by loss. My impression was based on drawings and models. Now that it’s a granite reality, what will you find?

It may depend on the weather — although not in the way you might expect. It took an awful afternoon of teeming rain and wind to make this austere, coldly beautiful monument to our dead come alive for me. What a pity that to experience anything like catharsis a visitor must be willing to get drenched.

I was fortunate to lose no one on 9/11. But I lost no one in Vietnam, either, and Maya Lin’s famous Washington wall made me well up. At the World Trade Center, site of mass murder far more recent than the war, I expected more than a dispassionate rekindling of sorrow that’s muted by the passage of 10 years.

If anything made me want to cry, it was the process that led to the designation of the design by gifted architect Michael Arad, who was later partnered with landscape architect Peter Walker to soften Arad’s original bleak vision. Arad’s “Reflecting Absence” was chosen in a blind competition by 13 judges appointed by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. (Yes, the same LMDC that took nine years to demolish the Deutsche Bank building.)

As New Yorkers know from renderings, the centerpiece of Arad’s scheme — on nearly half of what was once called Ground Zero — is the pair of square, reflecting pool waterfalls set within the Twin Towers’ footprints. Their scale is eye-popping: two cataracts, on each side as long as a city block.

But while they’re bound to be insanely popular with tourists, they suggest less the heartwrenching dispatch of souls to oblivion than massive industrial runoff.

The Memorial has engaged New Yorkers’ hearts more than any of the World Trade Center site’s other elements. Former Gov. George Pataki decreed it the “centerpiece” and forbade building on the “hallowed ground” of the Twin Tower footprints. Because the project is weighted down by so much political and emotional baggage, it was regarded as impolite — even impermissible — to criticize it too bluntly, as if to do so were to speak ill of the terrorist attack’s victims and their loved ones.

Yet questions raised seven years ago remain valid. Did making the footprints off-limits to human traffic immortalize the terrorists’ work more than was necessary to honor their victims? Why should the Memorial’s only portion which speaks to 9/11’s heroism and the city’s resilience — such as fire trucks and the Survivors’ Staircase — be stuck in a museum deep underground?

Moreover, are 8 acres on the 16-acre WTC site simply too big, diluting the focused intensity of, say, DC’s Vietnam Memorial — which unforgettably honors the memory of 58,000 Americans in a wall less than 500 feet long and a mere 10 feet high?

At the time I first wrote harshly of Arad’s vision, nothing seemed likely ever to emerge from the Ground Zero mud. The Memorial seemed too complicated and expensive to build. How, in a city where park water fountains must be turned off for half the year, could waterfalls nearly 200 feet on each side run day and night year-round?

Yet, thanks to a big push by Mayor Bloomberg and the unquestioned dedication of the architects and the Memorial Foundation, the project has emerged largely as conceived. (We’ll see how well the falls work in the next blizzard, though.)

After so many travails, it’s a wonder we have a Memorial at all — and it’s perhaps for that reason that learned architectural critics may be pulling their punches.

Paul Goldberger in The New Yorker praised the “strong, almost minimalist” footprints, the plaza’s “dignity and repose” and the manner in which the project balanced the WTC’s commemorative and commercial needs. In a dissent from the mainstream, Justin Davidson in New York Magazine termed the pools “chilly geometric fissures,” a “permanent necropolis in the heart of downtown” and, for good measure, “an adornment for real estate.”

Although I’d traipsed through mud and navigated catwalks to follow the progress of the office buildings, setting foot on the level earth of the plaza last week made the new World Trade Center more real to me than elevator rides did. The Memorial lets us into the site’s heart for the first time since 9/11, and being there in itself is exhilarating.

At least until more new buildings go up, the plaza affords a stirring perspective on downtown’s rebirth — 7 WTC, the Goldman Sachs headquarters and Frank Gehry’s undulating new apartment tower. The reflective curtain-wall facades of 1 and 4 WTC, the gleaming stainless steel and glass of the Memorial Pavilion (the entrance to the museum) and the pools make for an outdoor hall of mirrors.

But the severity of the Memorial ground soon asserts itself, as if the aim were to keep order as much as to console. Its stark geometry is broken only by the pavilion, a sleek wedge cocked at a sharp angle to the pools. The formal, near-martial mood pervades even the plaza. The swamp white oaks are aligned in straight rows, most set rigidly parallel or perpendicular to the pools. Pale granite blocks that will serve as seats stand little more than a foot above ground; it’s hard to imagine lingering on them for long.

Until the museum is completed, the falls will be the main attraction. Embraced in handsome bronze parapets which mark the Twin Towers’ perimeters, tumbling not once but twice into “voids” of near-impregnable black granite, they’re a helluva feat of engineering. Materials and craftsmanship are of the highest order. There was virtually no “value engineering,” the dreaded, common technique which substitutes lookalike, cheaper materials for the ones the architect wanted.

However, one of Arad’s most controversial components was dropped — walkways to galleries beneath the pool surfaces, where victims’ names would have been displayed through sheets of falling water. Arad told me he was “apprehensive” about losing them but now believes installing the names on the bronze parapet, a “line separating the living from the dead,” actually works better. Most victims’ loved ones certainly will prefer seeing them there rather than having to undergo a submarine-like trek below.

The names appear as hollowed-out carvings in the parapets. Meticulously bored through the bronze by water jets, they invite touching. The cutouts feel comforting on the fingers, the edges neither sharp nor too soft.

Their emotional kick, however, is undercut by the din of the falls — halfway between soothing and thunderous, not edgy but merely annoying. Some have claimed the sound blots out the racket of Manhattan. For me, it merged with the groan of cranes and earth-movers which will be part of the place for years to come.

That was a sunny, windless afternoon. Water poured in distinct streams down the granite from a lip behind the parapet to the floor 30 feet below; there, the water ebbed into the much smaller central void. Although renderings depicted the second descent as a torrent, the real thing resembled dribble down a drain. The falls did not, for me, evoke the thousands who perished or the towers that once stood.

In fairness, a different afternoon produced a different response altogether. It was raining furiously and full of wind. The black granite and the leaden sky merged into a mournful, enveloping monochrome. The falls mingled with the torrent to generate random spumes, swirling eddies and fireworks of angry vapor. The pool was turbulent as if with the spirits of the dead howling over the devil’s work. If I interpreted it so literally, so, I suspect, will others.

The Memorial is certain to draw huge crowds. Once the public grasps that it’s truly open, reserving a visit online might soon be as challenging as booking a seat at Momofuku Ko.

For sightseers and critics alike, it’s too early to definitively judge a work still very much in progress. The museum won’t open until 12 months from now. More than a third of the trees have yet to be planted, and those in place are years from maturing into a leafy canopy that will stretch to the pool rims. And the plaza’s northeastern quadrant can’t even be started until the Transportation Hub, which will lie partly beneath it, is finished.

Neither is the experience the same that visitors will one day have. The WTC remains a hazardous construction site, so public access to the Memorial is restricted for now. Memorial president Joe Daniels says the “interim” period may last up to three years, depending on how soon the office buildings are completed. Until then, entry is through a single gate off West Street, thus committing guests to something like a line of march.

That means casual enjoyment — if such a term is appropriate for a site commemorating victims of a mass atrocity — is far off. Until that day, the pools will be what people come to see. Shifting patterns of light and wind will alter impressions. So will nightfall, when the names are to be illuminated from behind and lights along the pool floors’ perimeters impart a ghostly glow, doubled by reflections on the granite, through the water.

The moment I felt most moved, though, had nothing to do with the falls’ watery narrative of descent into nothingness.

The Tower 1 (north) footprint lies almost at the door of 1 WTC, now more than two-thirds of its full height. Their close proximity first struck me merely as odd. But then, I wanted to lift up the new tower and plunk it on top of the pool where it belonged. At that moment I felt the pangs of absence more than I did from watching oceans pour down a granite drain.

scuozzo@nypost.com