The Vanishing Hitchhiker by Jan Harold Brunvand

Author:Jan Harold Brunvand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

The rest of the story, with its sad end for the reptile, is summarized in the headlines. The alligator turned out to be “seven and a half or eight feet” long. And “whence it came?” The reporter suggested maybe a passing boat from—of course—“the mysterious Everglades.”

Perhaps, then, Coleman has found the single origin for one of the most enduring urban legends. According to a former New York City Commissioner of Sewers there was a problem with alligators in the sewers in the mid 1930s. In his book on the development of utilities beneath Manhattan Island, titled The World Beneath the City, Robert Daley claims that recurrent reports of alligators in the sewers finally forced Sewer Commissioner Teddy May to inspect the situation personally. May told Daley that he did find alligators (averaging two-feet long); he immediately launched a campaign to eradicate them, and was able to announce their extermination by 1937. Some of the reports May had heard might have been folklore, of course, and Daley’s published account of his interviews (1959) may be one source both of Pynchon’s novelistic treatment and of some of the current folk legends. The most important point, however, is that only themes that the collective taste of the folk find appealing will be absorbed into their lore. In other words, “Alligators in the Sewers” fits right in with “The Spider in the Hairdo” and “The Kentucky Fried Rat” in their shared theme of animals contaminating the human environment.

Whatever the origin of the tales, both the intriguing example of dogged survival under adverse conditions and a general fascination with what is “down there” in the sewers are sufficient to keep the story popular. In fact, there was a children’s book, and a rather charming one, based on the legend which emphasized these points. Peter Lippman’s The Great Escape, or The Sewer Story (1973) chronicled the return of New York City’s sewer alligators to the Florida swamps by disguising themselves as tourists and chartering a flight from which they bail out over the jungle.

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