TWO GRAY LADIES IN ONE:

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 reported, 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.

—“Proof that the New York Times just hates New York,” Steve Cuozzo, the New York Post, yesterday.

Over the final few weeks of his presidential campaign, at rallies all over the country, President-elect Donald Trump took up a new slogan: “Drain the swamp!” His audience, presumably tired of insider shenanigans from Washington, D.C., ate it up. They chanted the phrase in unison, cheering with relish.

There’s a good reason for this: Most normal, well-adjusted non-Beltway Americans harbor a vigorous and healthy disdain for Washington, D.C. As any well-intentioned visitor to our nation’s capital can tell you, the sights are indeed grand, and the history is inspiring. But sadly, between the trips to the Smithsonian and the National Gallery, one begins to grow rightly suspicious when passing countless upscale bars filled with sometimes-smug 28-year-olds getting hammered on $16 cocktails that were purchased, either directly or indirectly, with your own hard-earned tax dollars.

For most Americans, in other words, a glitzy Washington, D.C., is not a healthy Washington, D.C. A gleaming, prosperous industry town usually makes for a cheerful sight, but not when that “industry” revolves around taking other people’s money — truly mind-boggling amounts of money! — and transforming it into subsidized incompetence, black-hole accounting, and a leading export of sanctimony.

Ah, but never fear. The New York Times sees things differently from flyover America, as it tends to do. After a flurry of post-election stories bemoaning the various potential downsides of President Trump — some legitimate, some not — the storied Gray Lady decided to run with this doozy: “A Newly Vibrant Washington Fears That Trump Will Drain Its Culture.”

One could write a doctoral thesis regarding the multiple-layered ironies within this headline, or merely stare at it and marvel for days.

—“Post-Trump Dispatches from Planet New York Times,” Heather Wilhelm, NRO, November 15.

As Wilhelm notes, “In the election’s wake, even Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the Times, noted that the paper was profoundly out of touch. ‘We’ve got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country, talking to different kinds of people than we talk to,’ he said, ‘and remind ourselves that New York is not the real world.’”

Well, that’s definitely true of certain office buildings in New York.