I just bought a T-shirt imprinted with a design approved by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection - not my usual fashion consultant. But how could I, a lifelong folklorist, resist, when the caption over the picture on the shirt reads "The Legend Lives"?
If I mention that the NYC DEP manages the Bureau of Sewers, maybe you'll know which urban legend the shirt refers to. It shows an alligator crawling out from under a manhole cover marked "NYC Sewers."Evidently the Big Apple's sewer officials reasoned that since they couldn't suppress the old legend that baby pet alligators flushed down toilets by New York City residents grow up and infest the sewers, then they may as well exploit the story - and in the process point out that it's just a legend.
The gator sports a pair of fancy sunglasses, giving it a rakish look appropriate for a living legend.
Sewer gators have been part of New York City folklore since the 1960s. One possible prototype is a 1935 New York Times story, which reports that teenagers fished an 8-foot gator out of a Manhattan sewer.
Only one city official has ever said that the sewers housed alligators, and he also claimed that the DEP had managed to eradicate them by 1937.
When I spoke to the chief of sewer design in 1982, however, he denied the claim and described this informant as a man with "undoubted abilities as a raconteur."
In developing this visual image of the city's sewergators, these folks are just following a long-term trend. This is surely one of the most-often-pictured themes of American urban legends.
The splashiest depiction of sewer gators was the 1980 film "Alligator," which began and ended with scenes of a flushed-away pet. After devouring certain chemical wastes, the baby grew to become what the movie's promotional blurbs described as "36 feet long and 2,000 pounds of pure terror."
One film critic called the production "a poor man's `Jaws.' "
In a lighter vein were two children's books featuring sewer gators. In Peter Lippman's "The Great Escape, or the Sewer Story" the gators come to the surface disguised as tourists, charter a plane to Florida and bail out over the swamps.
David McCaulay's 1976 educational picture book "Underground" is more subtle. In a section illustrating how sewer pipes are laid out, he simply sketched in a grinning gator coming down a submain with the flow and moving toward a main.
Most of the gator images in my file are comic strips and cartoons, such as an undated "Broom Hilda" strip in which a toothy surprise pops out of a toilet to annoy the cigar-smoking witch Hilda.
A cartoon in the "Off the Leash" series shows a similar setting, with the gator remarking, "Well, I'll be - nothing has changed since I was flushed as a kid."
Gary Larson's cartoon "The Far Side" pictured a gator in sunglasses and a sportshirt leaving a taxi while two swamp alligators look on. One says, "Well, for crying out loud. . . ! It's Uncle Irwin from the city sewer!"
A New Yorker cartoon depicted one sewer gator remarking to another, "Like so many New Yorkers, I've lived here all my life and I've never been to the top of the Empire State Building."
The most lurid item in my alligator images collection is the October 1987 issue of the Marvel comic book "Daredevil, the Man Without Fear!" The cover art shows a muscular red-costumed Daredevil engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a giant sewer gator. In the background the villain chokes the heroine.
You know, this might make a pretty good horror flick.