CLEVELAND - As the finishing touches were being put on the RMS Titanic at a shipyard in Belfast, Ireland, in 1911, the monstrous ocean liner was being hailed as the largest moving object ever built - nearly 4 city blocks long and 11 stories high.

As its launch date approached in early 1912, officials of the White Star Line, which owned the Titanic, described the $7 million vessel as not only the most luxurious ship ever constructed, but the safest as well. With its double bottom and 15 watertight bulkheads, the officials claimed the ship was unsinkable.

“God himself couldn't sink this ship,” proclaimed one of them.

Just a few days into the Titanic's maiden voyage, however, the experts were proven horribly wrong. The unthinkable happened in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, when the Titanic brushed an iceberg. A few hours later, early on the morning of April 15, 1912, the “unsinkable” ship went down, becoming forever identified with the greatest maritime tragedy in history. More than 1,500 of the Titanic's 2,200 passengers and crew died.

The story of the ill-fated ship and its unfortunate victims is being retold in a fascinating exhibit that opened March 2 at the Great Lakes Science Center in downtown Cleveland. “Titanic: The Exhibition” is the largest traveling display ever installed at the 6-year-old science center. It features more than 250 artifacts recovered from the ocean floor, including 50 that have never before been on public display.

What really helps bring the Titanic story to life, though, are a number of theatrical touches throughout the 14,000-square-foot exhibit, such as mood music in each gallery, dramatic lighting, re-creations of on-board scenes, and the occasional actor portraying a passenger or crew member.

To emphasize the human side of the tragedy, each visitor entering the exhibit is handed a “boarding pass” bearing the name of one of the actual passengers or crew members on the Titanic. It's not until nearly the last gallery in the exhibit that the visitor will learn whether the person named on his or her pass survived the disaster.

“Looks like I'm Walter Harris,” said a bearded man in a leather jacket as he glanced at the card he'd been given. “And it says here I'm a second-class passenger. I wonder if that's good or bad.”

The ship's story is told more or less chronologically, with the first galleries devoted to the Titanic's design and construction at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. Large black-and-white pictures show workers maneuvering giant propellers and assembling the inch-thick steel plates that made up the ship's outer layer, as lively Irish music sets an exuberant tone.

As visitors pass through subsequent galleries, the mood becomes progressively darker, as the initial excitement and hopefulness of the launch and maiden voyage give way to confusion, panic, and finally, a somber reflection on the fate that met so many of those on board.

One gallery simulates the ship's boiler room, where a massive metal door is poised to drop into place, sealing off the room in the event of a seagoing mishap. Clever use of mirrors makes it seems like there's a whole wall made up of dozens of giant boilers.

Among the exhibit's more interesting displays are the re-creations of parts of the first-class and third-class sections of the ship. After walking down a well-appointed hallway that would do a Ritz-Carlton Hotel proud, visitors emerge to see a lushly carpeted first-class stateroom suite. Ornamental sconces decorate the fabric-covered walls, and the stateroom has a large bed, dining table, dressers, and a doorway leading to a sitting room and private bath.

The fare for such a stateroom was more than $4,300, the equivalent of nearly 10 years' pay for a typical working man of the time.

At the other end of the accommodations spectrum is a third-class (or “steerage”) cabin, with two sets of bunk beds wedged into a closet-sized room. The steady throb of the ship's engines can be heard clearly through the bare metal walls.

An actor portraying a passenger named Patrick Dooley explained that he didn't feel at all cramped in the tiny cabin.

“Oh, it's luxury, it is,” he said in a rich Irish brogue, looking around his little space. “There's lots more room here than I had at home.”

He added that he'd paid about $35 to share the cabin - “a pretty penny, but worth it to get to America.”

The real Patrick Dooley, a native of Ireland's County Limerick, never made it to America, going down with the ship.

One of the few hands-on portions of the exhibit is the dimly lit iceberg gallery, where visitors are encouraged to touch a massive wall of ice and reflect on the fact that the ocean water that night was even colder than that (salt water doesn't freeze until it reaches about 28 degrees).

“Most of the people who were dumped into the water that night didn't drown,” said Rich Livingston, a Science Center spokesman. “They froze to death in a matter of minutes.”

Monitors in that gallery show a video from the Discovery Channel demonstrating how the ship broke apart and went down - and those who think they know what happened from seeing the 1997 movie Titanic are in for a surprise.

Several displays illustrate the efforts to recover and preserve artifacts found 21/2 miles below the surface of the Atlantic. Among the signature items in the exhibit are a three-ton section of the ship's hull and its large triple-chamber steam whistles, which could be heard for a distance of 10 miles.

The hundreds on items on display here represent only a fraction of the more than 5,000 artifacts that have been recovered from the Titanic during six expeditions since 1987. Many of the others are in storage or featured in other Titanic exhibits around the world.

Along with plates, eyeglasses, clothing, and other personal effects, the displays here also include a few of the creepy-looking deep-sea bugs and worms that were found inside some of the artifacts and are now being preserved in jars of clear liquid.

One gallery spotlights the dozens of passengers on the Titanic who had been bound for northern Ohio. Among them was William Harbeck, a 44-year-old filmmaker from Toledo who was returning to the States after an extended business trip to Europe. He was traveling not with his wife, but with his purported mistress, a 24-year-old model he had met in Paris.

Both Harbeck and the woman died when the ship went down. His body was later recovered - still clutching the model's purse - and Harbeck's wife eventually brought it back to Toledo for burial in an unmarked grave.

Another wall of the same gallery contains a complete list of the Titanic's passengers and crew, and it reveals the fate of each. When the man who had been given Walter Harris's boarding pass studied the list of second-class passengers on the wall, his face fell.

“I didn't make it,” he said softly, a touch of genuine sadness in his voice.

To augment the information in the exhibit, a digital recorder and headphones can be rented in the science center lobby for $5. The story told on the recorder is interesting, but visitors may find that the sound effects and music coming through their headphones sometimes compete with the audio effects in the exhibit itself.

In conjunction with the Titanic displays, the science center's six-story Omnimax domed theater is featuring a 40-minute film, Titanica, which details the discovery and recovery efforts at the wreck site. The 1991 film follows a Russian-American salvage mission, and also includes the memories of a Titanic survivor, who sailed on the ship as a 7-year-old girl, accompanied by her parents. The cost of the movie itself is $7.95, but package deals are available.

First Published March 9, 2002, 1:23 p.m.