December 3, 2025: Urban Legends: Sewer Gators

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two figures who together helped spread an urban legend, and one broader way to AmericanStudy it.

From what I can tell, it has for some bizarre reason occasionally been the case that New Yorkers have bought baby alligators as pets, decided that they don’t want to keep them, and flush them down the toilet, leading to the genuine (if usually tragically brief, as they can’t really survive down there) presence of these tiny gators in the city’s sewers. But the urban legend that there are full-grown alligators living in New York’s sewer system is largely due to one unique individual, the public worker Teddy May. I can’t sum up May any better than do the three extended passages featured at that hyperlinked sewergator.com page, but I will highlight this quote from Sewer Division Chief John T. Flaherty, featured in the 1999 book Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends: “Yes, Professor, there really was a Teddy May…almost as much of a legend as the New York City Alligator [Alligator cloaca novum Eboracum] itself.”

If May was apparently notorious among his fellow public workers, and perhaps to a degree in the city’s conversations more broadly (at least during his mid-20^th century life), it took an author and book to extend that legend beyond the Big Apple. That text is NYPD officer turned journalist and acclaimed novelist Robert Daley’s first book, The World Beneath the City (1959), an ostensibly documentary work that leans well into the realms of both folklore and humor, with Teddy May as its primary guide for both. Daley writes, “Sewer inspectors first reported seeing alligators about 1935, Teddy May being Superintendent at the time. Neither May nor anyone else believed them.” But Flaherty notes that “in the fullness of time, [May] rose to become a Foreman or, perhaps, a District Foreman.” So it is apparently Daley whose belief should have been a bit more hard-earned, and May whose stories are likely as mythic as those full-size sewer gators.

But even if the gators aren’t really there, the legend certainly is, and like all such tales has a lot to tell us about its and our worlds. In this case, I’d say this urban legend is particularly illustrative of the ways we think about the first word in that phrase, our urban spaces. For at least the last 150 years, many American narratives have been dedicated to spreading fears about our cities, and more exactly about the unseen dangers that lurk around every corner in these urban landscapes. In B.V. Hubbard’s Socialism, Feminism, and Suffragism, the Terrible Triplets, Connected by the Same Umbilical Cord, and Fed from the Same Nursing Bottle (1915), one of the worst books in American history despite having one of our best titles, he writes that “In large cities people do not know their nearest neighbors, and it is sometimes dangerous, both from the moral and financial point of view, to make indiscriminate acquaintances without some investigation of the proposed acquaintance.” Hubbard is using the idea as an analogy for the dangers of Suffragism, but it also succinctly reflects this fundamental fear of the urban unknown—and what could be more unknown nor more fearsome than the legendary creatures lurking in a city’s sewers?

Next urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?