But alligators? Are there really reptiles living beneath one of the most exciting cities in the world? The story is that wealthy New York families visiting Florida would purchase baby gators as pets. Soon after, when the novelty wore off and the gator started to demand more food, they were disposed of through the family toilet.
The reader of course can believe as much of the story as he pleases, and it is right to inform him that the sewerhunters themselves have never yet encountered any of the fabulous monsters of the Hampstead sewers. As a suitable finale, I present excerpts from a New York Times about police plans to stalk alligators they believed were living in a Bronx River lair:. The start of the explorers. The proper method of catching an alligator alive was the subject of a conference this afternoon between the police chief and his men.
A hurried visitor to Police Headquarters told the police chief that a piece of liver would make an alligator literally walk across the water to shore and that it could be captured alive easily with the type of net generally used by butterfly chasers.
The police chief put in a requisition for enough liver to feed a good-sized alligator, and one of his men promised to lend the explorers a fishing net for the expedition. Fact Checks. Critter Country. Can Alligators Live in Sewers? And, of course, the New York sewer alligators. What lurks beneath the city? Once they tired of their new pets — or at least, realised quite how big and hungry they were going to get — the owners would flush them down the toilet.
This, at least, is the main explanation given for how so many people claim to have spotted the beasts in New York, a city for which the climate is far, far too cold for them. As with many urban legends, the story persists because it actually seems to have a grain of truth to it. The next, and most famous, came three years later when two teenagers shovelling snow in East Harlem came across one nosing its way out of a manhole. Since then, there have been regular stories how reliable is not entirely clear of alligators spotted in lakes, reservoirs and rivers near the city.
None of them, alas, have matched the high drama of the manhole alligator of So, to be clear, when we say a grain of truth, we mean just that. At a distance, people were snapping photos with big-lens cameras. Workers in overalls were throwing out names. One pulled his friend's finger towards the car, as if to offer him up for dinner.
As we waited for pest control to turn up, everybody seemed strangely cheered by the appearance of a bad-ass reptile that could bite them. I squatted down, and there it was on the wet asphalt, crouching motionless. Not an 8in baby alligator: this was more like 2ft. I thought of my dog, poised to hunt, and wondered if the gator's stillness was a prelude to lunging for the ankle of one of its hecklers. Looking away no eye contact — I learned that trick early on when approaching my skittish dog , I held my iPhone at the edge of the car, and snapped, hoping for a shot.
I missed, so I looked again. And slowly, bewilderedly, the gator blinked. It seemed less like a menacing predator, more like an abandoned pet cowering under a car, forlornly hoping for tips on how to play its role. In fact, it reminded me of me, at every publishing party I'd attended during my first years in New York. Here was a fresh-off-the-boat New Yorker, like the baby arctic seal seen floating on an ice floe on the Hudson near the Chelsea piers, or the handsome, bewildered coyote who managed to wander over a train bridge in Inwood that swings open and closed, and into Central Park.
Maybe the gator would settle in among us, like the peregrine falcons who nest on the wide ledges of celebrities' fancy Fifth Avenue co-op buildings, or the flock of tropical parrots released or escaped pets that flourish year-round near the warmth of a Brooklyn electrical substation.
I found myself imagining a happy life for the gator, in the streams that still flow below the basements of some of Manhattan's oldest buildings, fed by some gentle janitors. The lady cop cautioned me to be careful, but the poor thing seemed one of us, a stage-one New Yorker, blinded by its lights.
I stared at it, thinking: "Little, lost alligator washes up out of the New York sewer and is menaced by tough New York rats, bureaucrats, and push-cart owners that almost run over its tail, until finally it returns to its safe, cozy sewer.
Surely, there's a children's book in here somewhere. One thinks of novelists as inspired by muses, and living by their wits.
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