While most urban legends are based on rumors, embellished half-truths, and unsubstantiated claims, the legend of “alligators in the sewers” can be traced back to historical documentation verified by multiple sources. The legend originated in the New York metropolitan region with the story that alligators lived in sewers, swam in the waste, and ate rats and garbage. According to Richard M. Dorson, founder of the study of contemporary mythology, the first reports of alligators in sewers came from marijuana harvesters in the 1920s who, while smuggling their crops through New York City sewage tunnels, allegedly discovered a colony of full-grown American alligators. Another account alleges that alligators were brought back to the city as pets by vacationers to Miami, Florida; when the reptiles grew too large, the owners supposedly released them into street sewage drains or flushed them down toilets, and the alligators have survived in the sewers ever since. Accounts also explain that over time the alligators turned white due to their lack of exposure to the sun. Such reports have never been proven, however, and exist only as myth.
As with other urban legends, “alligators in the sewers” was initially propagated by the news media and was then circulated by word of mouth among communities in New Jersey and New York. The first reports of alligator sightings, though, were above ground. In the summer of 1932, Westchester County police in the suburbs north of Manhattan began a well-publicized alligator hunt after local teenagers discovered a dead three-foot alligator and reported sightings of dozens more swimming in the Bronx River. The hunt concluded that the dead “alligator,” which was actually a crocodile, had escaped from a local backyard where it was kept as a pet, and no others were found. During the fall of 1933, another hunt ensued after the alligators that were kept in a lagoon at Military Park in Newark, New Jersey mysteriously disappeared, and were believed to be swimming in the nearby Passaic River.
The first media report linking alligators with sewers appeared in the New York Times on February 10, 1935. Teenagers discovered an American alligator underneath a street drain while shoveling snow in East Harlem at East 123rd Street. It was thrashing around in the brackish water, trying to clear itself of ice. The teens lassoed it with rope, pulled it out of the sewer and then killed it with their shovels. The alligator weighed 185 pounds and measured eight feet in length. Local residents theorized that a passing steamer carried the alligator from the Everglades, and that it had fallen overboard in the murky Harlem River. No other alligators were found initially, yet sewer workers publicly protested this additional hazard to their occupation. “[T]hem guys been drinkin,’” said Teddy May, commissioner of sewers in New York in 1935. “I’ll go down there […] and prove to youse guys that there ain’t no alligators in my sewers.” According to an interview conducted in 1959, May, affectionately known by his workers as the “King of the Sewers,” then discovered a alligator colony living in the tunnels, “serenely paddling around” in the water:
The beam of his own flashlight spotlighted alligators whose length, on average, was about two feet. Some may have been longer. Avoiding the swift current of the trunk lines under major avenues, the beasts had wormed up the smaller pipes under less important neighborhoods, and there Teddy found them. The colony appeared to have settled contentedly under the busiest city in the world. (Daley 1959, 187–189)
May ordered an extermination campaign, which included poison baiting and flushing the reptiles out of the tunnels to arteries where hunters waited with .22 rifles. The hunt concluded in 1937 when May announced to the public, “The ‘gators are gone.”
Throughout the twentieth century, alligator sightings in New York kept cropping up, preserving the legend that they continued to live in the sewers. “The legend lives on, but it’s not true to our knowledge,” said Steven Lawitts, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in 2009. “We have no alligator sightings dead or alive, except on our T-shirts” (Sulzberger 2009). Alligator images emblazoned on DEP T-shirts and on pins given out at the city sewage treatment plant immortalize the legendary reptile as a “house-mascot”; but despite claims that the sewers are alligator-free, they have continued to appear. In 2000, a four-foot, five-inch American alligator was captured in Staten Island; in 2001, an eighteen-inch baby alligator was found sunning at the Harlem Meer in Central Park; in 2010, another eighteen-inch alligator was found crawling out of an overflowing storm drain in Queens, New York. Whether publicly denounced by city officials or disregarded as rumor, media reports of sightings continue to substantiate the legend of “alligators in the sewers.”
As is common with urban legend, pop culture has popularized the legend of “alligators in the sewers.” Published in 1963, Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel V, set in New York City, featured a city-run Alligator Patrol whose job it was to hunt the giant, sewer-dwelling alligators. In its own way the novel synthesized a fictional account of the “alligators in the sewers” legend, venerating earlier yet undocumented stories of alligators as pets, while mythologizing the extermination campaign carried out by Commissioner of Sewers Teddy May in 1935:
Did he remember the baby alligators? Last year, or maybe the year before, kids all over New York bought these little alligators for pets. Macy’s was selling them for fifty cents; every child, it seemed had to have one. But soon the children grew bored with them. Some set them loose in the streets, but most flushed them down the toilets. And these had grown and reproduced, had fed off rats, so that now they moved big, blind, albino, all over the sewer system. Down there, god knew how many there were. Some had turned cannibal because in their neighborhood the rats had all been eaten, or had fled in terror. (Pynchon 1974, 33)
The film Alligator (1980) told the story of a thirty-six-foot-long alligator that lived in Chicago’s sewer tunnels and was strong enough to break through pavement to attack unsuspecting pedestrians. Alligator presents an evolution of the “alligators in the sewers” legend, where the narrative is transposed to Chicago instead of New York. In its sequel, Alligator II: The Mutation (1991), alligators with voracious appetites kill hundreds of people after consuming experimental growth hormones. In both films, protagonists are skeptical of stories about the killer alligators; the stories are legends until the dangerous reptiles confront the heroes. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a fictional team of anthropomorphic, crime-fighting turtles, is, perhaps, another variation of the “alligators in the sewers” trope, originating as a comic book series in 1984, and then appearing as a series of three feature films in the early 1990s. Similar to the Alligator films, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tells the story of reptiles living in the urban sewer systems; but, whereas the Alligator films depicted the reptiles as evil beasts, the turtles are instead heroes.
Ryan Donovan Purcell
See also Big Water Snake of the Blackfoot; Champ; Hudson River Monster; Underwater Panthers; Urban Legends/Urban Belief Tales
Further Reading
Berger, Meyer. 1935. “Alligator Found in Uptown Sewer.” New York Times, February 10.
Daley, Robert. 1959. The World Beneath the City. New York: HarperCollins.
Dorson, Richard M. 1973. America in Legend: Folklore from the Colonial Period to the Present. New York: Pantheon Books.
Fergus, George 1980. “More on Alligators in the Sewers.” Journal of American Folklore 93 (368): 182.
Horn, Jack. 1975. “White Alligators and Republican Cousins—The Stuff of Urban Folklore.” Psychology Today (November): 126, 130.
Inglis-Arkell, Esther. 2013. “When Did We First Get the Idea of Alligators in the Sewers?” Io9.com. November 4.
Pynchon, Thomas. 1974. V. New York: Bantam Books.
Sulzberger, A. G. 2009. “The Book Behind the Sewer-Alligator Legend.” New York Times, November 23.