A year after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the New York Times issued an editorial called “Filling in the Void.” It dealt with the prospects for rebuilding at ground zero. “City officials,” the Times asserted, “have posed some fascinating questions about whether the new Lower Manhattan shouldn’t be much more a neighborhood, providing housing to apartment-starved New Yorkers, rather than a collection of offices for which there are not, currently, any likely tenants.” It seems, however, that the Times has changed its mind about the city’s need for office space — at least when it comes to the new headquarters the New York Times Co. hopes to construct between 40th and 41st streets on Eighth Avenue.

For it turns out that while the New York Times newspaper was reporting that there aren’t currently tenants for a collection of offices, its development partner in its own lunge for a position in the office-space market was preparing to ask the city for a bailout of the new New York Times building. The Times’ metro section reported yesterday that Forest City Ratner has just asked city officials for $400 million worth of Liberty Bonds. These are bonds Congress authorized to the New York City and state governments for the purpose of rebuilding the city in the wake of the September 11 attacks. “With millions of square feet of vacant space in Midtown Manhattan today, Forest City has been unable to find a tenant for its space, making it difficult to secure financing,” the Times said.

Far be it from us to suggest that the Times Co. and Forest City Ratner have no right to enter the real-estate business. Or, for that matter, to build large new offices overlooking Midtown Manhattan. But it’s a lot harder to see the logic of hard-pressed taxpayers, in the midst of a historic budget crisis at the federal, city, and state levels, being asked to ride to the rescue of this deal. If one reads the language of the law authorizing Liberty Bonds, the governor and mayor have a certain amount of discretion over where in the city the bonds can be used. But according to a statement released by Governor Pataki, these funds were intended to benefit “major projects that revitalize Lower Manhattan.”

Given all the legislative history of Liberty Bonds and all the distress downtown, it’s going to be something to see how the officers of the New York Times Co. try to justify their bid for this subsidy. The Times itself quoted Deputy Mayor Doctoroff yesterday as saying the city would employ two criteria in evaluating its merits: whether the project has boroughwide or citywide importance and whether the project would not be built without Liberty Bond financing. But before the bonds can be issued, there’s going to have to be a public hearing, and it may well be that those criteria will be called into question.

The Times quoted Bettina Damiani, project director of Good Jobs New York, an advocacy group that evaluates economic development projects, as saying she disagreed with the newspaper’s suggestion its real-estate project was a legitimate expenditure for the city and state. The Times has already received much city and state support for its project in the form of $26.1 million in sales tax breaks from the state plus other subsidies, according to the newspaper’s article. The Times and its development partners have already made use of the state’s power of eminent domain to seize other people’s property so that it could build what it wanted.

Plans for the Times building were in the works for the construction of this 52-story tower at least a full year before the attacks on the World Trade Center. Ordinary people all over the city are being asked to pay huge increases in property taxes and income taxes to help the city through the budget crisis. For the Times to come forward in the midst of this environment and ask that taxpayers help it to get $400 million in easy funding for its luxury real-estate deal, well, it’s the kind of chutzpah the Times itself would deride were it done by any other company.