New sculpture celebrates the enduring myth of the NYC sewer alligator

Legend has it that the alligators started out as the tiny, cute playthings of children. But when they grew too big, parents flushed them down toilets, sending them deep into the bowels of the city’s sewers.

Abandoned to New York’s underbelly, the alligators did not wither and die. Nourished by trash and rats, they grew. They found each other, bred and formed colonies. For generations they roved unseen, threatening to snap up anyone foolish enough to wade into their domain.

The playthings had morphed into monsters — and have haunted a city’s collective imagination for a century.

Now, they’re being honored in the heart of the city. Last week, Swedish artist Alexander Klingspor helped unveil “N.Y.C. Legend,” a bronze sculpture and ode to the enduring myth of the sewer alligators. The 1,320-pound work depicts an alligator curled around a manhole cover, guarding the detritus of the city — a quarter, a straw, a soda can, a paper bag from McDonald’s.

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The nonprofit Union Square Partnership worked with the city’s Department of Parks & Recreation to display the sculpture at the 6½-acre park.

Klingspor, who lived in New York for more than a decade until moving to London in 2019, said he sought to honor New Yorkers with his work, seeing a parallel between the city’s residents and alligators, which have evolved and adapted over millions of years and “have to survive extremes, just like New Yorkers.”

“You have to learn to survive, and you have to learn to be resilient, and you have to learn to heal yourself whenever the city beats you down,” he told The Washington Post.

Klingspor, 46, said the idea came to him while visiting an anthropological museum in Mexico City. As he looked at the sculptures and artifacts of ancient Mayan and Incan civilizations, he realized human beings for millennia have revered and feared animals as deities. He wondered whether modern-day New Yorkers had done anything like that, even if it was less formal.

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Klingspor’s mind turned to the sewer alligators. He started researching the origin of the myth. He discovered an ad from the 1930s in Popular Mechanics offering live baby alligators for $1.50 to sate a “rage for Baby Alligator pets” sweeping the country.

“Just hatched in the deep marshlands of the South, at an amazingly low price. These corking little pets will be shipped to you by mail, carefully packed — safe arrival guaranteed,” the ad read.

On Feb. 9, 1935, a group of teenagers in East Harlem spotted a gator down a storm drain, lassoed it and pulled it up with a clothesline — all eight feet and 125 pounds, according to the New York Times. When it snapped at them, they beat it to death with shovels.

“I’ve described this as New York City’s greatest true-ish urban legend,” Michael Miscione, who served as the Manhattan borough historian from 2006 to 2019, told Time Out in February. “It is an urban legend because there aren’t any alligators in the sewers, but there was at least one alligator in the sewer.”

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Feb. 9 became an informal holiday of sorts that Miscione dubbed “Alligator in the Sewer Day.”

Klingspor said his sculpture is not just a tribute to the legend of the sewer gators but also to the city itself. Despite metal scales and an open-mouthed snarl, Klingspor said he hopes that his sculpture captures the magic and mystery that made him fall in love with a city where he planned to stay for only a year. Instead, he stayed for 11, smitten with the “city of cities” filled with knowledge, expertise and the great energy of people who are all fighting to be there, he told The Post.

“I hope my sculpture reflects some of that,” he added.

“N. Y.C. Legend” will stay in Union Square until June, but Klingspor said he’s working to find a permanent home for his sculpture elsewhere in the city.

Otherwise, the alligator may again lose physical form, forced back into the underworld to haunt New York’s sewers — and the city’s collective imagination.

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