Alligators In the City

A famous New York City urban legend is that of the Sewergator - the legend of alligators living in the sewers, breeding and wandering around and occasionally popping up to frighten people.

The legend is said to have its origins in the mid-1930s. In 1935, the New York Times reported that a seven-foot alligator had got out of a ship that had come from the Florida Everglades and into the Harlem River, where it made its way into a sewer. Some boys claimed to have found it while they were dumping snow into a sewer in Harlem. Two years later, people waiting on a Brooklyn subway platform claimed that they saw a two-foot alligator crawl out of a garbage can. Supposedly a man had put a package in the can just before this.

The then-Commissioner of Sewers, Teddy May, claimed to have seen several alligators, too.He was interviewed for a 1959 book by Robert Daley, The World Beneath the City, which fired up the legend and gave it teeth, so to speak. In that book, May is quoted as saying that there was a massive hunt for colonies of alligators up to two feet long, in the 1930s - although there is no other evidence for this.

Sometimes the gators were supposed to have come from ships from Florida, as in the 1935 case. But people also believed that baby alligators were brought back from Florida by tourists as souvenirs, and then flushed down the toilet when people realized that they were not the best choice of urban pet. The gators were then supposed to have made their way to the sewers and flourished. Several biologists have pointed out, however, that the sewers are too cold and have too much bacteria in them for the alligators to survive.

Snopes suggests that the legend may have arisen in part from the 1851 British story about feral pigs roaming around in the sewers of Hampstead, London. This is intriguing but does seem unlikely, considering that the New York alligator story started over 80 years after that of the Hampstead pigs.

I have uncovered a couple of sightings that - as far as I know - have never been mentioned in the source material, until now:

ca 1800, Manhattan: In 1853, the Brooklyn Eagle interviewed an old man named Peter Embury, "father-in-law of the poet Mrs. Embury." He had a few good stories about the old Collect Pond in lower Manhattan. [Emma Catherine Embury was an early 19th century poet and editor, who lived in Brooklyn].

Embury said that they found an alligator in the Collect once. The Collect Pond was a 48-acre pond located at what is now Franklin and Centre Streets in Manhattan, just west of Chinatown. The Tombs prison stood at that site in the 19th century; it was built upon the small island in the middle of the Collect, where there had been a gallows in the 18th century. At that time the pond itself was often used as a skating rink and place of recreation, too.

The Collect, which is called the "Collet" in this article, was "at one time rumored to be the resort of an enormous serpent." The Eagle reporter thought that this was "a stray alligator, driven by currents [which] might have been brought in by some vessel." Embury also told a story about himself and some other boys finding a foot-long lizard-like creature with red eyes and bat wings, on a tree next to the pond. He said he hadn't seen the enormous serpent, though.

July 1871, Brooklyn: A Mr. Michael Campbell of Leonard Street had a pet alligator stolen from him. The alligator liked pigs, it was said, and flies. "The lovely creature could also be relied upon to persuade little boys not to throw chips into the City Hall fountain; and if the Eighteenth Ward sewer were left to the occupancy of the alligator, Mr. Thomas A. Devyr would be perfectly willing to let the subject alone." [Thomas Devyr was a printer living in the 18th Ward, but there is no mention of him re sewers, in the Eagle; a John Devyr in Williamsburg at this time was a bit of a troublemaker, but again, not with reference to sewers, as far as I can tell[.

August 1887, Brooklyn: A four foot long alligator was spotted in Coney Island Creek. The boys who had been swimming nearby (and quickly got out of the water) said "it was as big as a log of wood and looked awful wicked." Isaac Ring, the engineer of the Coney Island sewer, said "he saw the alligator jump off the sewer pipe and into the marsh." He stuck to his story, even though "references to Gravesend beach whisky left him unmoved and Chief Engineer Powers failed to weaken him by sarcastic suggestion of the 'jim jams.'" Powers went off to investigate, it was reported, but the results of his detective work remain unknown.

Alligator picture from NYPL Digital Gallery. As is the 1796 image of the Collect, link here; and that of Coney Island Creek in 1924, here.

SOURCES & LINKS

The New York Times articles are:
"Alligator Found In Uptown Sewer," Feb. 10, 1935, p. 29.
"Alligator In Subway," Jun. 7, 1937, p. 21

And from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
"Reminiscences of the Old 'Collet,'" Jun. 18, 1853, p. 4.
Untitled article, Jul. 11, 1871, p. 2 - concerning Campbell's pet alligator.
"Coney Island Incidents," Aug. 24, 1887, p. 3.

The alligator legend debunked at Snopes.com
Cryptomundo on the legend
Radiohead wrote a little song about this
LiveScience article about sewergators - very short, but with a nice alligator photo.
SewerGators Fact and Fiction at NYC24

And apropos of the Hampstead pigs, I recommend Thomas Boyle's book, Black Swine In the Sewers of Hampstead (Viking, 1989), about sensationalism in British newspapers in the 19th century. He doesn't go into much detail about the pigs, however; so VDM might be traveling across the Atlantic to do a little investigating, in the future!