‘WAD’ A MESS!

Double-deck tourists gum up street signs

Gum-chewing tourists are really sticking it to the city.

Visitors have been slapping gum wads onto lower Manhattan street signs as their double-decker buses pass underneath — turning the signs into a mess of masticated goop.

“The tourists do it,” an employee of TopView, one tour company that runs buses, told The Post on Tuesday.

“They take pictures when they put the gum [on the signs].”

One bus-lane sign outside City Hall, on Broadway between Murray Street and Park Place — where the buses often stop for traffic lights — looks as if it’s been dipped in chewed-up bubble gum.

The placard is also plastered with stickers and red earbuds, such as the ones used by tourcompany audio guides.

There is another similarly splattered sign on Broadway between Vesey and Barclay streets.

“This close to Ground Zero, that’s disrespectful,” said one NYPD officer stationed near City Hall, about a 10-minute walk away from the World Trade Center.

“The city knows but it’s New York,” the officer added. “Nobody wants to do anything.”

Double-decker tour-bus companies in the city — TopView, Gray Line and Big Bus Tours New York — didn’t return requests for comment on the sticky situation and what they’re doing to address it.

The city’s Department of Transportation refused to comment.

This isn’t the first time the city has been faced with the problem.

In 1939, New Yorkers sticking and spitting their gum became so problematic that then-Mayor Fiorello La Guardia warned it was costing the city “literally hundreds of millions of dollar a year to remove.”

GOO YORK: Visitors on double-decker buses (such as below, left) are gunking up street signs (such as the one above) as they pass beneath. One cop griped about the lack of a city response to the sticky situation.