c.2013 New York Times News Service

NEW YORK — There are several ways to look at the Plaza Hotel. It is one of Manhattan’s great architectural gems, of course. Others know it as a setting in a long list of novels and films, most recently “The Great Gatsby.”

Still others think of it as the place where, in October 2010, Charlie Sheen laid waste to his room after a fun-filled night with an escort-slash-porn-star, convinced that she had stolen his $165,000 watch, and wound up in the arms of the New York City police.

Option No. 3 is the choice — the only one possible — for the two scandal-minded bus tours now being offered in New York, two-hour sojourns from Midtown Manhattan to the Battery that review celebrity mayhem and criminal mischief for a ticket price of $49.

In February The New York Post, in partnership with Metro Sightseeing, an offshoot of Circle Line Sightseeing, began taking riders on a tabloid excursion around the city, revisiting many of the sites immortalized in the newspaper’s renowned headlines, although not the tavern in its most famous one, “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” That would require a long detour to Queens.

The Post tour now faces competition from TMZ, the gossip website and television show. Two weeks ago TMZ, in partnership with On Location Tours, started a New York counterpart to its Los Angeles tour. Like the West Coast original, it lets riders relive the drunken rampages and sexual misadventures that make so many of today’s celebrities so appealing.

The Post tour runs once a week, Thursday, with one bus in the morning and one in the afternoon. The day I boarded, the weather was unseasonably cold and rainy, which may explain why the double-decker bus, with open roof, carried only two people in addition to me. The passenger list was, in full, Ira and Phyllis Rosenkrantz, Bronx natives now residing in Rockland County.

The trip started in Midtown, at 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, and proceeded to Central Park South. There the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel came into view, the occasion for our first Post headline, “Rich Bitch.” As Post readers may recall, when Leona Helmsley, the hotel’s owner, died in 2007, she left $12 million to her Maltese lap dog, Trouble. It was a headline writer’s dream.

The ghosts of headlines past appeared once more as the bus turned onto Fifth Avenue and headed south.

Plaza Hotel: “Trashed! Sheen in Coke-&-Hooker Rampage at the Plaza.”

St. Patrick’s: “Pew-Trid Pervs.” In 2002 two fans of the “Opie and Anthony” radio show have sex in one of the cathedral’s vestibules, hoping to win the show’s annual Sex for Sam contest, sponsored by Samuel Adams beer. An altercation ensues, the police arrive, the shock jocks are fired.

Empire State Building: “Chute and Miss.” In 2006 an attention-seeking daredevil tries to jump from the 86th-floor observation deck, equipped with a parachute that he had concealed under a foam fat suit. Security guards intervene.

Manhattan Criminal Court: “Bad Heir Day.” Anthony D. Marshall, hair tousled by a gust of wind, enters the building for his arraignment on 18 charges of defrauding his mother, the philanthropist Brooke Astor.

Our guide, a veteran of the more orthodox Manhattan bus tours, evidently found it hard to shake old habits. Slow traffic produced a lot of down time, and the tangy Post material disappeared for long stretches.

The Rosenkrantzes and I were invited to look at the site of the original Macy’s, and marvel at a guy on the sidewalk balancing multiple cups of coffee for a delivery. When the clouds parted briefly, our guide wondered aloud, “I wonder if we’ll get to see a rainbow?”

Though it might seem strange,, I felt a crying need as the tour went on: more New York Post. And how about a few mob rubouts, or sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll, the tabloid trifecta?

Product placement is not a problem on the TMZ tour. The enclosed bus, which takes off from Midtown twice a day, is outfitted with drop-down television screens that the onboard guide cues every couple of minutes to broadcast a prerecorded clip. You get, at full volume, the patented TMZ voice-over, delivered in the snide, braying-jackass voice familiar to fans of the television show.

Riders, about 40 of them on my tour, are encouraged to whoop it up at every turn. Along the way, there are little contests. If you can guess, looking at the screen, whether a celebrity is about to give a cheery wave to the TMZ cameraman or flip the middle finger, for example, you win a TMZ T-shirt.

The approach is relentlessly trivial and strenuously contemporary. It makes the Post tour look scholarly. If a celebrity did it, it’s news. If a Kardashian did it, it’s bigger news. If it took place in or outside a hot nightclub, involved rappers or movie stars, and resulted in criminal charges or court-ordered rehab, stop the presses.

On a good night, Lindsay Lohan satisfies every one of these requirements all by herself, which is why a hefty portion of the two-hour tour is devoted to the Lindsay Lohan Terror Zone. This is a swath of downtown where that actress has left her distinctive imprint, in the form of flying fists, hurled shot glasses and lots of running mascara.

Our tour guide was well chosen, a celebrity worshipper who delivered a mix of canned shtick and personal annotation, usually heartfelt. “What’s with the monkey thing?” he asked, apropos of Justin Bieber and his latest pet. When riders seemed a little fuzzy on the melee involving the rappers Chris Brown and Drake at the SoHo nightclub W.i.P., he seemed genuinely worried, like a high school history teacher who senses that his students do not know which side won World War II.

“It was one of the biggest fights in celebrity history,” he protested.

It takes a certain kind of person to show unfeigned interest in an apartment formerly inhabited by Rachel Uchitel, prominent in the romantic scandals surrounding Tiger Woods a few years ago. Our guide was such a person. Actors, singers, fashionistas — all were absolutely fascinating to him.

For that reason, and because the story was splashed all over TMZ, I sat slack-jawed in disbelief when the bus rolled down Broadway through Times Square, and no mention was made of Amanda Bynes. This is my main complaint.

As everyone in the whole world knows, Bynes, who has been lurching around Manhattan and behaving strangely for weeks, actually eclipsing Lohan in the “cute, talented young actress in a downward spiral” category, had been in the headlines again just the day before. The police raced to her apartment after an employee in the building reported seeing her smoking an unknown substance from a bong in the lobby. As the law closed in, said bong flew out her window on the 36th floor.

Amanda Bynes. Bong. Police. I mean, come on. This is the most famous celebrity bong toss in history. Get on it, TMZ tour.

ALL ABOARD THE TABLOID TOURS

NEW YORK POST HEADLINES TOUR

10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Thursdays, departing from the northwest corner of 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, Manhattan. The tour lasts two hours, and tickets are $49; 888-652-2695, nypost9.com9/tour.

TMZ TOUR

10 a.m. and 1 p.m. weekdays; 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. on weekends; departing from Ellen’s Stardust Diner, northeast corner of 51st Street and Broadway. The tour lasts two hours, and tickets are $49, with an additional $3 processing fee. It can be booked through Zerve, 855-486-9692, or at tmz9.com; click on “book your NYC tour.”

News from © The Associated Press, 2013