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A recent news article about the Internet rumors swirling around a particular presidential candidate included a statement by the writer that he was waiting to learn that [the candidate] put the first alligator in the New York City sewer, an acknowledgement that a tale about the looming threat of deadly alligators silently lurking just beneath city streets has come to be recognized as a quintessential urban legend Although no hordes of alligators (mutant or otherwise) dwell within the bowels of the New York City sewer system, reports of saurians found in municipal waterways have been common newspaper fodder for over a century. Some of these accounts have been more fiction than fact, but a surprising number of abandoned, escaped, or otherwise misplaced gators — everything from infants to full-grown adults — really have been found in urban waters far from their native habitats over the years. So, I wasn't taken aback by June 2008 news reports announcing the discovery and capture of an alligator in the Chicago River: What caught my eye, however, was the claim that this was the first such saurian ever pulled from that river. A UPI account opened with the following paragraph: And the Chicago Tribune reported: Given the prevalence of urban alligator reports over the last century, I wondered if this was truly the first one sited at the Chicago River, or whether it was merely being reported as such because nobody recalled any earlier incident. Sure enough, a search through newspaper archives not only turned up a similar account from 1902, but one that had been published in the pages of the Chicago [Daily] Tribune itself (transcribed below): Apparently alligators have yet to get their fill of news headlines. A 4-5-foot alligator was discovered living in Humboldt Park Lagoon on Chicago's West Side in July 2019.
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