Alligators in the Sewer
It was once a fad among New Yorkers vacationing in Florida to bring back baby alligators for their children to raise as pets. These baby gators eventually grew up and outlived their cuteness and their desperate owners would eventually flush them down the toilet to get rid of them.
Some of these hastily disposed-of creatures managed to survive and breed in the dank Manhattan sewer system, as the story goes, producing colonies of giant, albino alligators beneath the streets of New York City. Their descendants thrive down there to this day, completely hidden (apart from the rare heart-stopping encounter between sewer gator and sewer worker) from human eyes.
The beginning of a Myth The earliest published reference to alligators in the sewer — in what Jan Harold Brunvand refers to as the "standardized" form of the urban legend ("baby alligator pets, flushed, thrived in sewers") — can be found in the 1959 book, The World Beneath the City, a history of public utilities in New York City written by Robert Daley. Daley's source was a retired sewer official named Teddy May, who claimed that during his tenure in the 1930s he personally investigated workers' reports of subterranean saurians and saw a colony of them with his own eyes. He also claimed to have supervised their eradication. May was a colorful storyteller.
'New York White'
The tale was well known throughout the United States by the late 1960s, when, according to folklorist Richard M. Dorson, it became associated with another icon of sewer lore, the imaginary "New York White" — a potent, albino strain of marijuana growing wild from seeds spilled out of baggies hastily flushed down toilets during drug raids. Not that anyone had ever actually seen the marijuana because of course, their were alligators down there.
Herpetologists disregard the very idea of alligators thriving in the New York City sewer system. It's cold down there most of the time, they point out — freezing cold during the winter — and alligators require a warm environment year-round to survive and reproduce and burgeon into colonies. And if the cold didn't kill them off, the polluted sewer water certainly would.
Actual New York City gator sightings:
Adding fuel to the legend is the intriguing fact that wayward alligators — escaped or abandoned pets, — do occasionally turn up in the streets of New York City. For example:
• June 2001 - A small cayman (a semiaquatic reptile of Central and South America that resembles an alligator but has a more heavily armored belly) was spotted and eventually captured in Central Park. • November 2006 - A two-foot-long caiman is captured outside an apartment building in Brooklyn. Police say it "snapped and hissed" at them.
cempazuchiles (marigolds) and barro de obispo (cockscomb). Among the edible goodies offered are skulls, coffins and the like made from sugar, chocolate or amaranth seeds and special baked goods, notably sugary sweet rolls called pan de muerto that come in various sizes invariably topped with bits of dough shaped like bones and, in some regions, unadorned dark breads molded into humanoid figures called animas (souls). All of these goods are destined for the buyer's ofrenda de muertos (offering to the dead).
