Spartan and utilitarian, sprawling and surprisingly luminous, the nearly completed PATH terminal at the World Trade Center is a three-dimensional reminder that before the trade center was anything else — civic emblem, compass point, mass cemetery, mountain of wreckage — it was a hub of movement.

On a brief tour, Gov. George E. Pataki introduced the temporary terminal to a group of officials, executives and reporters. Commuters will follow next month.

"When people come in from New Jersey into the bathtub, it's not going to be any ordinary morning," said Joseph J. Seymour, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is building the $323 million terminal. "Conversation's going to stop."

Mr. Pataki lingered along Tracks 2 and 3, some 60 feet below the sidewalk, looking out across the bathtub, as the trade center foundation is called. Then he turned around and regarded the long blue sign over the platform: "World Trade Center."

More than a memory, the old trade center terminal even shows itself in a few odd places, like glass doors leading to the E train platform and an overhead sign, pointing to the N and R trains, that still carries ad panels for the Monster online job site.

Except for a broad bank of escalators, there is little else about the temporary terminal that connects it recognizably with the old. As designed by Robert I. Davidson, chief architect of the Port Authority, it is a deliberately spare place of gray steel columns, concrete floors and corrugated floor decking. It is eventually to be replaced by a permanent terminal designed by Santiago Calatrava.

Now open on the sides, the terminal's rooms will be enclosed in translucent panels and in vinyl screens that will act as scrims, permitting a diffused view while serving as backdrops for quotations about New York and New Jersey.

Mr. Pataki visited the station after giving a speech about Lower Manhattan in which he said: "At 9:10 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a PATH train pulled into the World Trade Center, rescued the last people on the platform, closed its doors and left the station, becoming the last train to leave before the south tower collapsed. On Nov. 23, 2003, those same eight cars that left the station on that fateful morning will be the first to come back and finish that journey."