On a February afternoon in 1935, a group of teenagers in East Harlem was shovelling snow into an open manhole on 123rd Street when something in the dark started thrashing. They looked down. An alligator looked back up. It took a rope, a noose, and a fair amount of yelling before Salvatore Condulucci and his friends dragged a seven-and-a-half-foot reptile out onto the street, where it promptly died, most likely from the cold, or the fall, or both. The New York Times ran the st