Lately, New York has served up some disappointments that, aggregately, make me wonder whether anyone with money or power really gives a hoot about whether this is a great city or not. You would think, or hope, that September 11, 2001, would have occasioned a renewed love of this city. It seems rather to have occasioned a desire to speed along the death of New York. The sale of “Kindred Spirits,” the privatization of our public parks, the misdirected renovation of Grand Central Terminal, the insane rezoning of the Greenpoint and Williamsburg waterfronts – to these I shall add one more, and then get back to my job of celebrating the city.

That one thing is the public’s loss of access to interior places the public had always had access to before. An effect of September 11? Sorry, but no. At least not in the two cases that rankle me most.

I admire Mayor Giuliani, but I hated how he shut the public out of City Hall. City Hall doesn’t belong to the mayor. It doesn’t belong to the City Council. It belongs to the people of New York. I remember when I could just walk into City Hall, even on a weekend, and go up to the Governor’s Room to look at the portraits. It is no longer the “people’s house.”

What rankles me as much is the case of the Woolworth Building across Broadway. The glorious skyscraper, completed in 1913 and until 1929 the world’s tallest, was designed by Cass Gilbert. A triumph of art and engineering, the building was not just a New York treasure but a national one. Back before Woolworth went out of business, the building’s managers observed a policy that had been in place since the building’s opening, of allowing the public unfettered access to the gorgeous lobby. Such lobbies were designed for public use. They contained stores, for example, and in some cases, like that of the now-inaccessible New York Life Building at 26th Street, were designed as majestic through block spaces evoking the great arcades or gallerias of Europe.

Everyone knows how sumptuous the Woolworth lobby is. Its mosaics and stained glass, by Otto Heinigke and Owen Bowen, its murals by Carl Jennewein, its fun-poking “grotesques” by Gilbert’s draftsman, Thomas Johnson – these were among the pleasures of living in New York. But it’s now as though the lobby has been packed up and moved to Arkansas, for all we are allowed to see of what its makers wanted us to see. The building’s management today apparently instructs its lobby guards not only to bar the public, but to do so in the most demeaning way possible – as though to say, “You miserable sap, what makes you think you have any right to look at this lobby?”

As I said, it has nothing to do with post-September 11 security, for these policies were well in place before September 11. Our elites have given up the ship. Their message is that New York has no future.

fmorrone@nysun.com