The Times Is Still Hating on New York

SILLY newspaper stories can have serious consequences. Take the ridiculous Metropolitan section cover-page opus in this past Sunday’s New York Times. While most of the world cheers lower Manhattan’s stirring revitalization since 9/11, leave it to the Times to find a “downside.” It’s “just too crowded,” according to reporter Winnie Hu’s long-winded article.

Any sane person would regard great companies at a new World Trade Center, families happily ensconced in former office buildings and myriad shopping, dining and entertaining options as cause for celebration in a zone that once rolled up the carpet at 5 p.m. on weekdays and never rolled it out on weekends.

Yet the Times absurdly depicts the area as near-unlivable, impassable by car or on foot, tourist-trampled and full of menaces to sanity and safety.

That’s just the thing for Downtown’s image as major companies decide whether to move there. (As The Post’s Lois Weiss re- ported, streaming music and video service Spotify is considering moving its New York headquarters to One and Four World Trade Center, a prospective deal that would be a boon to the complex and to all of lower Manhattan.)

Spotify’s honchos presumably are savvy enough to walk around the block and see how life-affirming and exciting the neighborhood’s become. But, according to the Times, nightmares have befallen the precincts south of Chambers Street.

Among them: terrible “congestion,” “hordes of commuters and selfie-snapping tourists,” “dark and claustrophobic” sidewalk bridges everywhere and “bags of smelly, leaking garbage.”

But wait, there’s more! A construction “cacophony,” scaffold “labyrinths,” a garage approached “through a plaza where parents and children walk,” and, horrifically, restaurant food arriving “too late to be served.”

To the city-hating types who edit and write for the Times, any petty disturbance to a handful of grumblers is worthy of a sprawling feature that can only scare those who know nothing about Downtown.

Hu’s 3,000-word story quotes precisely four (count ’em, four) people who actually live in or near the area, or 750 words per whiner.

Among the “overcrowding” victims is a lady who has “all but stopped using the City Bike system to commute” to her job on Maiden Lane because pedestrians and other cyclists get in her way. (Not that it’s ever a problem uptown, of course!) It turns out she doesn’t even live in FiDi, but in Tribeca.

Of six unflattering street photos the Times chose for the story’s print version, three showed uncollected garbage — a common sight in every neighborhood — to suggest that mostly sparkling Downtown is a river-to-river, pestilent dump.

In fact, except for the unsurprisingly thronged blocks around the World Trade Center — which still aren’t nearly as hard to navigate as are much of Midtown, Soho and the Lincoln Center area — most of Downtown remains much less crowded than the rest of Manhattan.

On streets such as Pine, Wall and William, the difference between today and the past is simply that people are out at most any hour, shopping, strolling and walking their dogs.

City life inevitably brings nuisances, and Downtown’s 230,000-strong workforce and 60,000 residents are quite capable of handling them.

It’s no surprise the Times prefers the post-apocalyptic landscape of the past, when the World Trade Center remained a pit and streets from river to river stood dark. The paper after 9/11 inveigled against rational reconstruction and contributed to delaying the job for years.

Now it’s trying to do it again.