Treasures abound beneath city streets for anyone brave or crazy enough to explore the murky depths of the Big Apple’s sprawling 7,500-mile sewer system — all in search of a wayward wallet or piece of jewelry that may have fallen through a grate above.
Those temptations were put on full display last week by two separate incidents caught on camera Friday night, where troops of people were seen emerging from manhole covers across Brooklyn after sneaking around the steamy depths in what police said were likely scavenging operations.
The ever-present threat of arrest and obvious risks to personal safety are apparently no deterrent for these intrepid subterranean explorers — for whom no gemstone is too grimy and no coin too crud-covered to add to their loot pouches — with numerous such incidents capturing the city’s attention over the years.
One happening made headlines In 2015, when part time city Department of Environmental Protection worker Marquis Evans, then 21, led two pals down a Brooklyn manhole in search of “gold, jewelry and guns” in city sewers, cops said at the time.
The trio took several such belowground “scavenger hunt” excursions before the law caught up with Evans and his friends Damien Nieves and David Hannibal. They were slapped with criminal trespassing charges after spending four hours searching for them.
“God knows what they were looking for,” then-police Commissioner Bill Bratton said following the arrests.
“I know damn sure I wouldn’t be crawling through the sewers of New York, but these three evidently were up to something down there.”
A decade later, the allure of scooping up lost valuables was also the motivation for a different threesome who were arrested for descending into the Brooklyn sewers in April 2025.
One of the men, Willer Green told police at the time, “The reason we went down there is that people lose their gold down there. We got to sell it to make money.”
And the allure of the sewers has apparently always been around — a spate of New York Times articles from the 1800s described claims of jewels being pulled from their depths, while tales of criminals tossing drugs and other stashes into storm drains has filled movies and crime stories over the years.
The age of internet streaming has ratcheted the call of the sewer up another level, with videos from urban explorers cropping up online over the years to give first-person perspectives down the dark depths of subway tunnels and slimy city drain systems.
After the 2015 incident, former Commissioner Bratton said there was little that could be done to prevent foolhardy people from prying up the city’s nearly 200-pound manhole covers and descending into the dangerous tunnels below.
“Entering a sewer without proper authorization and training is illegal, incredibly irresponsible and dangerous,” he said at the time, according to the Times. “The reality is we cannot be everywhere protecting everything from everybody.”
No arrests have been made in the latest spate of Brooklyn sewer treasure hunters, where separate groups of men were seen climbing out of two manhole covers in Gravesend and Williamsburg.
Footage from the Gravesend incident obtained by Flatbush Scoop showed a man prying back a manhole cover from McDonald Ave. around 2 a.m. and stashing it between nearby cars — when seven men proceeded to file out of the ground one at a time.
They each had flashlights and appeared to be wearing boots and overall waders, and milled together around a trio of cars while they stripped off their filthy attire.
The individuals tossed their clothes — and whatever they found in the ground — into the cars, before driving off.
Sources told The Post it was likely that these tunnels were likely up to nothing more than their scavenging predecessors had gotten up to — citing coins, wallets, scrap metal, jewelry or other valuables as their probable targets.
The source noted that urban scavenging of that nature is a more common practice in other countries, but is far from unheard of in New York.
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