Long before sickly "Godzilla" was pulled from the chilly waters of Prospect Park Lake on Sunday, alligators have lurked among us.
Alligators are not native to New York City and, according to the National Wildlife Federation, their habitat only extends as far North as North Carolina.
But Michael Miscione, the former Manhattan Borough Historian, says alligators have turned up in the city since at least 1815, when a hunter found an alligator in Newtown Creek.
“There have been alligator encounters all through the centuries,” he said.
An alligator that took Gotham by storm, Miscione said, was the one found by a group of boys in an East Harlem sewer back in February 1935, an event chronicled in the New York Times and several others newspapers.
“Some boys were shoveling snow into a sewer grate,” Miscione said. “They noticed a movement below, and peered in, and basically they saw a live alligator. He wasn't very energetic, but he was alive.”
Miscione said the boys tried to capture the alligator. “They lassoed it with some clothes line, dragged it to the street,” he said. Then, when the alligator snapped at them, they clobbered it with their snow shovels.
“This does not have a happy ending, they basically beat the alligator to death,” he said.
But as long as you keep feeding it, an alligator gets bigger and bigger regardless of its enclosure. And so ... if your alligator is too big, what are you gonna do with it? If you're not sensible, you'll just dump it in the river or dump it down the sewer.
But the East Harlem alligator lived on in urban lore: “When I was growing up we were told by adults that there are alligators in the New York City sewer system,” Miscione said. “I call it New York's greatest true-ish urban legend because the sewer system is not, and was not populated with colonies of alligators, but there was this one episode where one singular alligator was discovered down there.”
It isn’t clear how the 4-foot-long Godzilla, as he was named by his rescuers, landed in Brooklyn on Sunday. It “very lethargic” and “probably cold shocked,” as Dan Kastanis, NYC parks senior press officer, described his condition in a statement.
No one had taken credit for abandoning the creature, which was hauled from a lake.
Miscione said he uncovered a “rash” of alligator incidents in the 1930s, which he believes may have been the result of mail orders. “You could buy via mail order a baby alligator from an alligator farm down south or in California,” he said. “They cost about $1.50 And there are advertisements for these, these mail-away baby alligators in all sorts of magazines … in the ‘30s.”
Not like a goldfish
The problem, Miscione said, is that many buyers didn’t understand what they were getting into, noting that an alligator is not like a goldfish.
“Where if you keep a goldfish in a small bowl, it'll stay small,” he said. “But as long as you keep feeding it, an alligator gets bigger and bigger regardless of its enclosure. And so ... if your alligator is too big, what are you gonna do with it? If you're not sensible, you'll just dump it in the river or dump it down the sewer.”
An alligator also had a supporting role in a larger drama that also starred a 435-pound tiger kept by a construction worker in his Harlem apartment back in 2003.
Antoine Yates, and his pet tiger Ming, also shared their apartment with an alligator named Al. Yates, who came to be known as New York City’s Tiger Man, had apparently brought the tiger cub home when it was just 3 months old and bottle fed it before it grew so much that it consumed 20 pounds of chicken thighs a day.
According to the New York Times, Yates was arrested and served a brief time in jail, while the tiger and alligator were relocated to a sanctuary in Ohio.
Other animals have turned up turn in unexpected places in New York City.
A city Parks and Recreation Department site takes note of a herd of guinea pigs freed in Central Park in 1998 – 43 all told – by an owner who had recently been evicted from his apartment.
In 2004, a white Bengal tiger briefly eluded his handlers while performing with the Cole Brothers Circus in Forest Park. It first gave picnickers a charge and then took to the Jackie Robinson Parkway, before being coaxed back into his cage.
There also was the 2-foot crocodile spotted in Central Park – Daimon The Caimon – in 2001. In 2012, a haul from a Brooklyn apartment included five pythons, two alligators, two bearded dragons and a scorpion.
And back in Manhattan, more than one chimpanzee has lived in an apartment, rather than a zoo. In 2021, an 80-pound cougar was removed from an apartment.
Godzilla had been relocated to the Bronx Zoo, where, authorities said, it was being evaluated. A spokesperson for the city’s parks department warned that releasing animals into city parks is illegal.
“Parks are not suitable homes for animals not indigenous to those parks—domesticated or otherwise,” said Kastanis from NYC Parks.
