This photo is an urban legend come true—a real baby alligator crawling out of a New York City sewer. What makes this image especially lovely though, is that it was snapped hastily with a cameraphone.
Apparently New York resident Joyce Hackett found herself driving past an intersection where a large group of people was gathered around a car. Like any other curious person might, she quickly pulled over, slipped out of her car, and peeked around the crowd to see what was going on. She saw the two-foot-long fellow pictured above and acted quickly to get that particular snapshot:
Ms. Hackett quickly, carefully, slung her iPhone to ground level and snapped a shot, she said. A police officer on the scene warned her that maybe she should not do that.
But angling for a better shot, she stuck her phone down a bit further.
"Be careful!" the officer said, with a bit more urgency.
Then the officer snuck a peek at the pictures on Ms. Hackett's iPhone and asked her to e-mail them to her.
There's still a bit of a mystery regarding just how this alligator wound up crawling around New York, but thanks to a quick-thinking cameraphone-carrying citizen, we can all have visual proof that urban legends can come true. [NYT via Gawker]
Photo by Joyce Hackett/New York Times