The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers - Part One

THE DEVIL WITHIN

The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Episode One: Beneath the City

On February 9, 1935, three teenagers shoveling snow into an open manhole on East 123rd Street reportedly discovered something moving beneath the ice.

An alligator.

The following morning, The New York Times carried the headline “ALLIGATOR FOUND IN UPTOWN SEWER.” The animal was reportedly seven to eight feet long, weighed roughly 125 pounds and had been dragged from beneath East Harlem using a makeshift noose fashioned from clothesline. Whatever happened on that winter afternoon, the story gave one of America's greatest urban legends something most legends can only dream of: a date, an address and witnesses.

But before we can hunt alligators beneath Manhattan, we have to understand how an entire hidden world came to exist beneath New York in the first place.

In Episode One of our latest New Monsters investigation, we descend into the history of the city beneath the city—from Manhattan's vanished streams and polluted Collect Pond to overflowing cesspools, cholera epidemics and the massive nineteenth-century engineering projects that transformed New York. The arrival of Croton water in 1842 helped create a new problem on an enormous scale: all that water eventually had to go somewhere. The solution was a vast network of brick-lined sewers constructed beneath a rapidly expanding metropolis.

Then we head south to the Sunshine State, where Florida's booming tourist industry once offered visitors a souvenir that would be almost unimaginable today: living baby alligators. They were cute, exotic and small enough to bring home. Unfortunately, alligators possess the irritating habit of becoming considerably larger alligators.

And that's where the legend gives us the image that has survived for generations: the unwanted pet disappearing down the toilet and into the sewers below.

The plumbing makes that particular scenario considerably more complicated than folklore suggests. The biology is even less cooperative; New York's cold underground environment is a miserable place for an alligator to establish a permanent home. Yet the reptile reportedly discovered in 1935 was real enough to make headlines—and that was all the story needed.

Finally, we meet Teddy May, the New York sewer worker whose stories would transform one misplaced reptile into something much larger. More than twenty years later, writer Robert Daley recorded May's extraordinary claims in The World Beneath the City: according to May, there hadn't been just one alligator beneath Manhattan.

There were dozens.