Now There Are Lizards in the Sewers?

A couple of weeks ago, while walking through Carroll Gardens, a friend pointed out a sticker fixed to a sewer. "Warning. Sewer lizard extermination in progress," it read. "Stay clear." For more information, we could visit the website [www.sewer-alert.org](http://www.sewer-alert.org).

With too much time on my hands since graduating from Columbia's School of Journalism, I decided actually to try my newfound investigative skills. Was this sewer spraying for real? If not, then who would waste the time or energy to contribute to an already cliche myth of latrine reptilians living beneath the streets? And why?

The myth of alligators in the sewers is about as fresh as deli coffee. And though it's not uncommon for people in warmer climates, like Florida or Australia, to spy a set of yellow eyes peering out of a grate, how could the creatures survive a New York winter?

And yet, they have. In February of 1935, The New York Times ran a story on a 125-pound, almost 8-foot half-frozen croc found in a snow-filled sewer on E. 123rd St. According to the Times, the animal snapped weakly until it was beaten to death by the snow-shovel-wielding crowd. No one could explain how it found itself in the sewer, or how it had survived.

Some say the legend began there. Others maintain that a New York family vacationing in Florida brought home some souvenir critters, only to discover that they were too much work. Thus they disposed of the reptilians the way one naturally gets rid of things: down the drain. (In fact, a search in old news articles for the words "found in a sewer" elicited some surprising and depressing results; from the pleasant?college ring missing for 34 years?to the extremely unpleasant?a staggering number of newborn babies. And people wonder why garbage disposals were banned in the city until four years ago.)

With all this background in mind, I set out to debunk the urban legend. My friend assured me that the sewer-alert website "looked pretty authentic," but I was skeptical after reading about the "lizardicide spray" used to kill the 200-kilogram "C. Hemizibecus Gigantus." It wasn't difficult to guess who'd be behind the hoax: all the links at sewer-alert lead to a site for The Chronicle, a tv show on the Sci Fi Channel. Still, that was just too easy, and I wanted to be sure.

I looked up the site's URL on a handy search engine?what we call a "whois look-up" in the business?and found that the domain was registered to J Lubow at the Sci Fi Channel. A quick call to the extremely helpful receptionist led me to Mr. Lubow?Jeff?and even connected me to his extension.

"How did you get my name?" Lubow asked. I mentioned said receptionist. "Oh great, the secret's out."

Lubow directed me to Sci Fi's p.r. rep, Lana Kim. "We all sat around wondering how to promote the new show, The Chronicle. Then the alligator was found," says Kim, referring to the caiman yanked out of a Central Park pond in June. "We're always thinking of out-of-the-box campaigns."

Sci Fi's staff placed between 2500 and 5000 stickers throughout the city. Their crews, in orange vests and hardhats, affixed the stickers to grates. Kim admits that the channel did "accrue a small fine" for defacing city property, although the stickers, she maintains, were made to peel off easily.

All in all, it did seem like a publicity coup for the channel, whose CEO remarked in 1999 that he would "beg, borrow, or steal" to boost his company's profits. The lizards were featured in articles from Entertainment Weekly to dailies in Ireland. The channel has received e-mails from sewer and/or sci-fi fans, people with more time to kill than even I have: "Please advise as to when spraying will commence in our area. We don't know how much longer we can hold them at bay"; "We have caught one of the creatures described in your alert. My husband, Lennie, has skewered it and it is hanging in our garage."

As for The Chronicle, which airs Saturday nights, it managed to garner the channel's highest ratings ever with its July 14 premiere. The show's premise? The program, Lana Kim told me, centers around a Columbia J-school grad who gets a job at a newspaper and discovers that every urban myth is essentially true.

Kim added that the show's tag line is "Believe everything."