The New Monsters: Alligators In The Sewers - part Two

THE DEVIL WITHIN

The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Episode Two: The Man Who Saw Them

They kept seeing alligators.

Sometime in the 1930s, New York sewer inspectors began returning from beneath the city with an increasingly ridiculous claim: there were alligators living beneath Manhattan. Their boss, Theodore “Teddy” May, had a more reasonable explanation.

Whiskey.

According to Robert Daley's 1959 book The World Beneath the City, May became convinced his workers had discovered somewhere underground to hide booze. He sent men to investigate. Nobody found the whiskey.

But the alligator sightings continued.

Eventually, Teddy May decided to descend into the sewers himself—and according to the story he later told, his flashlight swept across the water and revealed something he hadn't expected to see.

Several alligators.

In Episode Two of Alligators in the Sewers, The Devil Within heads back beneath 1930s New York to meet the men whose jobs took them into a hidden world most New Yorkers would never see.

We explore what it was actually like to work inside Manhattan's enormous underground infrastructure, where sewer inspectors navigated brick tunnels by flashlight during the lowest-flow hours of the night. The dangers were very real: rapidly rising wastewater, powerful currents, blockages and deadly gases. And the things moving through those tunnels could be bizarre—barrels, Christmas trees, jewelry, false teeth, weapons and practically anything else New York managed to lose down a drain.

Then we meet Teddy May.