The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Part Three

THE DEVIL WITHIN

The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Episode Three: The Monster Under Manhattan

By 1980, the alligator had escaped.

The legend that began with misplaced reptiles, a very real 1935 newspaper story and Teddy May’s extraordinary tales of an underground colony had finally crawled out of the sewers and into American popular culture.

Hollywood was waiting.

In the wonderfully excessive 1980 creature feature Alligator, a little girl brings home a baby alligator named Ramon. Her father eventually decides reptile ownership has run its course and flushes the animal down the toilet. Twelve years later, Ramon has survived beneath the city by eating discarded laboratory animals pumped full of experimental growth hormones.

The adorable souvenir has become an enormous, man-eating monster.

And the remarkable thing is that audiences barely needed the premise explained. By then, everybody knew the story.

Baby alligator. Toilet. Sewer. Darkness. Monster.

In the final episode of Alligators in the Sewers, we explore how one of America’s greatest urban legends escaped New York and became part of our shared cultural imagination.

Robert Daley’s 1959 book The World Beneath the City gave Teddy May’s stories a permanent home. Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel V. populated Manhattan’s sewers with albino alligators. Books, newspapers and word of mouth continued adding details until ordinary abandoned pets had evolved into enormous, pale, blind creatures supposedly feeding on New York’s endless population of rats.

By the 1970s, the city itself had become the perfect setting. Aging infrastructure, graffiti-covered subway cars, crime, disinvestment and the fiscal crisis transformed New York’s underground from a symbol of nineteenth-century engineering triumph into something darker. The tunnels beneath Manhattan became a place where anything might be hiding.

Then Alligator gave the legend its monster movie.

But reality has an irritating habit of occasionally helping folklore along.

In 2001, a caiman appeared in Central Park’s Harlem Meer. In 2010, police found a young alligator beneath a parked car near a storm drain in Queens. And in 2023, workers discovered an emaciated four-foot alligator in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. None were evidence of some secret breeding colony beneath New York. They were almost certainly abandoned or escaped exotic pets.

Which, of course, was exactly how the legend supposedly began.

Nearly ninety years after East 123rd Street, New Yorkers were still finding alligators where alligators had absolutely no business being.

And perhaps that is why this particular monster refuses to die.

The sewer alligator was assembled from pieces of reality. Americans really did buy baby alligators. People really did abandon exotic pets. Crocodilians really have appeared in New York. Beneath the streets really does exist an enormous hidden geography of sewers, subway tunnels, utility corridors, buried waterways and infrastructure most of us will never see.

Folklore simply connected those facts and populated the darkness between them.

Today, New York has gone one step further and embraced the creature. In 2023, artist Alexander Klingspor’s NYC Legend placed an enormous bronze alligator atop a manhole cover in Union Square. The monster supposedly hunted beneath the city had finally returned to the surface as public art.

First New York feared the alligator.

Then it laughed at it.

Eventually, it made the thing a mascot.

And that may make the sewer alligator one of the prototypes for everything we’ve been exploring in The New Monsters. Long before Slender Man spread through internet forums, before the Backrooms became a collaboratively constructed online universe, and before millions of people analyzed pixels searching for the Fresno Nightcrawler, New Yorkers were already creating folklore in real time.

They simply did it with newspapers, books, schoolyards and stories passed from one person to another.

New York built an extraordinary artificial wilderness beneath itself.

And every wilderness eventually gets a monster.

NEXT TIME ON THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN

Next time, we leave Manhattan behind and head for the rapidly expanding suburbs of Northern Virginia, where another distinctly American monster emerged from an entirely different landscape.

Our backdrop this time isn't the sewer.

It's the suburb.

In October 1970, police began receiving reports of a strange man wearing a rabbit costume who allegedly threatened people with an axe. Newspapers picked up the story. Then came another encounter.

Over the decades, those incidents accumulated escaped mental patients, mutilated animals, murdered children and a lonely railroad overpass that generations of teenagers would eventually visit after dark.

The strangest part of the Bunny Man legend isn't that much of what people believe about him never happened.

It's that something really did happen first.

Next time on The New Monsters: The Bunny Man.

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