Memorial quilts are being unfolded. Bagpipes are being tuned. The movie “World Trade Center” is being released today. Commemorative exhibits with artifacts and photos of victims are being installed.

With the fifth anniversary just more than a month away, the city is emotionally and logistically preparing to commemorate September 11, 2001, the day that two jetliners crashed into the city’s two tallest buildings and took nearly 3,000 lives.

The criticisms of the sluggish pace of rebuilding the World Trade Center site will be moved to the sidelines from center stage — at least for a day — as New Yorkers remember.

Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki released the city’s official plan for the September 11 memorial service, which will include four moments of silence to acknowledge the exact times when each plane hit and when each tower collapsed, as it has for the last four years.

From ground zero in Lower Manhattan, where the city will be commemorating the attacks with its annual reading of the victims’ names, to the promenade on Staten Island, New Yorkers will gather. Church bells will ring.

“For those of us who lived through that terrible day, the recollections of it remain achingly vivid, and the sorrow that we feel for the loved ones, neighbors, and friends we lost remains etched in our hearts,” Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday in a statement. “The anniversary is a time for prayer and requiem, and it is also an occasion to recommit ourselves to the unwavering spirit that carried us through the worst day in our City’s history.”

In the week leading up to September 11 and on the day itself, dozens of concerts, forums, exhibits, and small get-togethers are planned. The events will be kicked off today with the nationwide release of Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center.”

The September Concert, as it is called, will include performances by the city’s police department band at Rockefeller Center, the New York Pops outside the United Nations, the New York Choral Society at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and dozens of smaller shows throughout the five boroughs. Those shows will coincide with dozens of others throughout the country and world and include a singalong of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” at 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Elsewhere, the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation is opening two photography exhibits on September 7 at the newly constructed 7 World Trade Center. Meanwhile, the World Trade Center memorial museum, which will open three years from now, yesterday said it acquired its first major piece, a fiberglass Statue of Liberty that was placed outside a Manhattan firehouse and covered in mementoes and turned into a vigil site after the attacks.

On September 8, a memorial quilt that has been traveling the country for four years will be unveiled at St. John’s University on Staten Island.The quilt is made up of 3,550 18-inch squares, each devoted to someone killed in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or on United Flight 93, which crashed into a Pennsylvania field. The brainchild behind the quilt, Cory Gammel, who is from California, said he wanted the blanket, which is a quarter of a mile long, in New York for the fifth anniversary.

An advocacy group is hosting a two-day event at the Marriott Financial Center Hotel just south of ground zero that will feature a number of speakers, including the father of an Oklahoma City bombing victim. The group will be presenting memorial quilts of its own to thousands of victims’ families, and it is launching a Web site in the next few weeks to archive photographs and information. It will devote a Web page to each victim of the attacks.

The New York Historical Society will be opening an exhibit called the Chelsea Jeans Memorial on August 25. The 50-square-foot glass-encased exhibit will feature a preserved clothing store, covered in ash and dust, which appears frozen in time.

The New School University is hosting a reading on the evening of September 11 that will feature the schools president and former senator, Bob Kerrey, and several other speakers, who will read from “The 9/11 Commission Report” and “102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers.”

The president of the Partnership for New York City, Kathryn Wylde, said there is reason to appreciate how far the city has come.

“While there is a lot of discouragement over redevelopment of the World Trade Center site itself, I think everybody agrees that Lower Manhattan is in better economic shape and is a stronger community than it’s been in modern history,” she said. She cited the recent announcement by Tiffany’s, which is opening on Wall Street, that the area’s economic outlook is good.

At Bryant Park, Fashion week will go on as usual, with models in Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta walking down the runway. For others, that day will be one of ceremony and prayer.

The chief of the 10th Battalion at Engine 7/Ladder 1 on Duane Street in Lower Manhattan, Gene Kelty, said the day is a quiet one for the department. In past years, he said, firefighters’ families have come to the firehouse, fire rigs have been brought out for ceremonies, and Masses have been held. “There are no festivities,” he said. “It’s a quiet day for us.”