Alligators in the Sewers: Why We Can't Stop Telling This Story

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 story the next day under the headline "Alligator Found in Uptown Sewer."

That single, well-documented event is almost certainly the seed of one of America's most durable urban legends: that the sewers under our cities are crawling with alligators, flushed away as unwanted pets and then grown monstrous in the dark. It isn't true, not as an ongoing phenomenon at least; sewer conditions kill alligators fast, and no colony has ever been found. But the story didn't need to be true to go around. As long as it was satisfying, it was told. And that's the part to think on if you write about folklore: the gap between what actually happened and what we need to believe happened is where the real story lies.

Why this one stuck

Folklorists have a name for tales like this: they're sometimes called "belief legends" or FOAF stories (from "friend of a friend"), and they share a few traits that the alligator story encapsulates:

• A real event at the root. Nothing spreads like a story with an actual receipt. The 1935 Times article gave the legend something to point to.

• A moral undercurrent. The story isn't necessarily about reptiles. People took it to be about what we flush, literally and otherwise, and the idea that they don't just disappear into the air, but they mutate and come back again. Now, this is a very old fear.

• An unverifiable geography. Nobody can easily check the sewers themselves. SO it's a real event, but the actual details are unverifiable.

This is the same architecture behind the vanishing hitchhiker, the Bloody Mary chant, the babysitter and the man upstairs: They hit us with a plausible seed, moral hook, and a setting just out of reach. See the similarities?

The part that gets missed

Here's what I think most retellings of the alligator legend skip: within a few years of that 1935 report, city officials including Teddy May, the man who ran New York's sewer department for decades, were fielding genuine complaints about reptiles underground, and by most accounts he spent real time investigating and, eventually, dismissing them. Whether or not you buy every detail of his story, the mere fact that a city bureaucrat's actual working life got tangled up in a piece of folklore is hilarious to some, an unnecessary waste of taxpayers' money to others. But when you remove all of that debate, it is the best evidence of how these stories function. They don't/shouldn't be left at the campfire site. They leak into institutions, the government, schools, society in general. In this case, people built policy conversations around a monster that from a newspaper clipping. (the Kentucky Fried Rat rumor of the 1970s also comes to mind, as does the "razor blades in Halloween candy" panic, just to mention other real, specific, non-random incidents that got generalized into a nationwide fear.)

That's the thread I return to when I am thinking about why urban legends deserve to be treated as folklore and not just internet noise: they are exactly like the older stuff. A changeling story isn't fully about fairies; it's what a culture uses to work out its fear and grief around a child who is suddenly, inexplicably different. In the same way, our sewer-alligator story isn't necessarily about alligators; it's about the anxiety of an unseen system beneath a city that mostly works, right up until you imagine it doesn't work.

Swap the century, culture, and vocabulary, and you've got the same human machinery running.

What's the version of this story you grew up hearing, and do you know if anyone's ever traced it back to something that actually happened?