From June 2015 to June 2016, the NYPD reports that there were 36 arrests involving Time Square ‘characters,’ but after the DAZ areas (Designated Activity Zones-btw. W. 46^th and W. 47^th) were established, arrests dropped to eight. Certainly there was lots of recent press given to “Hulks,” “Cookie Monsters” and a wild “Minnie Mouse” making contact with gawkers in ways the gawkers didn’t want. But what got The Post a front page picture and has had lots of tourists reacting each summer are the Desnudas, a truly unique phenomena to hit Times Square of late.

If you have walked through-or read The Post lately-you’ve seen these topless painted ladies who pose for pictures, they then charge for, posing and preening on our concrete shores. The Times reports that the first desnuda was first seen four years ago-during the summer of course-and primarily the ladies in question are Latinas (the word Desnuda is taken from the Spanish meaning ‘nude.’) Though the “Naked Cowboy,” real name Robert Burck, was the most revealing famous fixture of Times Square (though he never got naked) lately he has surely been overshadowed by these curvy nearly naked young ladies.

Despite the recent kerfuffle, and even a supposed incident last year where a couple of painted ladies accosted a 70-year-old-man, Mayor de Blasio is quoted as saying he doesn’t think there is a resurgence of desnudas this summer, maybe just too much coverage by The Post.

The baring of female breasts in public has been legal in New York for two decades now (yipee!). And as I reported on before, in the recent Disneyfication of Times Square, and especially 42^nd street, the seedy and even the slightly naughty has been driven out to the Lion King/Spiderman wholesomeness that has made the area into a bigger (and safer) tourist draw than ever. The desnuda’s manage to give the area of selfie stick choreography and food carts just the slightest scent of the sleazy. But really, they are not all that much different in their buck hustle than the ‘character’ hawkers one sees on Freemont Street in Las Vegas or those arty hipsters giving mini concerts busking in a London Tube station. One can’t blame The Post for trying to sell papers, but in the end this is all probably as his honorable Mayor declares, not much of anything to worry about…save maybe your kids spying a nipple or the dent of the top of an ass crack under all the paint. And so it goes for our summer so far.