For at least a few moments, the newly built Sept. 11 memorial, which opened to victims’ families on Sunday and opens to the public, via reservation, on Monday, triumphed after a decade of battles over cost, designs, fund-raising, how to order the names and whether to include ranks, places of business and other identifying details.

“This is now a place, not a construction site, not a design,” Alice M. Greenwald, the director of the memorial museum, said. “It’s now a place in New York, and I think that’s transformational.”

Most of the families pronounced the memorial beautiful, and they were moved, they said, just to have the names of their loved ones permanently displayed. For the more than 1,100 families who have never received a trace of remains, not even a fragment of bone, the memorial is a kind of graveyard.

After the first moment of silence, at 8:46 a.m., they began filtering into the plaza. They wore blue ribbons on their lapels as their entry credentials and as a symbol of the clear blue sky that preceded the moment everything changed.

In twos, in threes and even in 10s, they followed the hard stone sidewalks to the memorial’s salient feature, two giant pools in the footprints of the twin towers; arrayed around them were the names of 2,983 victims of the attacks in the twin towers, at the Pentagon, aboard United Airlines Flight 93 as well as those killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.