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The police say the men who entered the manhole in the middle of the road near East 35th Street and Avenue H in Flatbush, Brooklyn, were looking for valuables.

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Christopher Lee for The New York Times

The sewer system of New York -- the more than 7,500 miles of it -- exists to move the slush left behind in a city of millions. Still, for a branch of infrastructure, it has done a remarkable job of inspiring the public's imagination into believing it is so much more.

For imaginative thinkers, it is a subterranean alternate universe waiting to be explored, a smelly but rare slice of this well-trod city that has yet to be documented by tourists wielding selfie sticks. It is the home of a population of alligators, as the legend goes, and to the fictional pizza-eating, crime-fighting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

For others, it seemed like a place to find valuable items accidentally flushed away. At least, according to the police, that was the idea of the sludge-covered men arrested early on Thursday as they emerged from a manhole in Brooklyn.

"God knows what they were looking for," William J. Bratton, the police commissioner, told reporters. "I know damn sure I wouldn't be crawling through the sewers of New York."

The police said officers were called around 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday to the intersection of East 35th Street and Avenue H in a quiet stretch of East Flatbush, where residents were quick to notice the men working to lift a manhole cover.

"You don't just open a manhole cover like that, and jump right in," said Gaston Zitman, 50, who lives nearby.

Louis Lashley, 29, said the scene struck him as bizarre, as if it were from a movie. "It was like Indiana Jones in Brooklyn," he said.

Officers tried going into the hole to follow the men, but the fumes were overwhelming, the authorities said. Instead, the police pulled back and waited for the men to resurface. Hours later, shortly after midnight, they did -- though empty-handed, the authorities said.

The authorities said three men were arrested. The police first arrested Marquise Evans, a 21-year-old part-time employee of the city's Department of Environmental Protection, who was accused of opening the manhole cover for the other two men to go inside. Mr. Evans will be charged with reckless endangerment, as well as tampering and trespassing charges, the authorities said. Damion Nieves, 35, and David Hannibal, 45, were also arrested on suspicion of trespassing, the police said.

Mr. Evans, who works in the city agency's Bureau of Engineering Design and Construction, has been suspended pending an investigation, agency officials said. He was set to be arraigned on Thursday night. Mr. Nieves and Mr. Hannibal were given desk appearance tickets and will appear in court later; attempts to reach them by phone and Facebook on Thursday were unsuccessful.

Police officials said there was not much more that could be done to further protect the sewage system from intruders. "The reality is we cannot be everywhere protecting everything from everybody," Commissioner Bratton said.

"What happened here last night is what we ask people to do: See something, say something," he added. "Somebody saw them, it is an out of the ordinary action, and we responded."

Officials said there was a reason the sewer system was closed to the public. "Entering a sewer without proper authorization and training is illegal, incredibly irresponsible and dangerous," Chris Gilbride, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection, said in a statement.

The sewer system is not exactly the network of cavernous corridors as it is sometimes depicted in popular culture, officials said. Instead it can be confining in places, filled with overpowering fumes, and tunnels can rapidly fill during heavy rain.

Manholes can be difficult to penetrate. The covers can weigh as much as 195 pounds and require a crowbar or a similar tool to open.

The limited access seems only to feed into the mystique.

"They're dark and mysterious and off-limits," said Michael Miscione, the Manhattan borough historian. "Your imagination runs wild."

The intrigue surrounding the sewer has only been bolstered by stories from over the years.

A series of articles in The New York Times dating back to the late 1800s reveal accounts of gems being fished out as well as missing pets. It has been a getaway for escaped convicts and a place to toss drugs. Bodies have been found there, and in 1955, a woman in Jamaica, Queens, discovered 2,141 pieces of unopened mail, mostly Christmas letters, that had been dumped by temporary postal workers.

"Who knows what they will run into down there?" Ron Schweiger, the Brooklyn borough historian, said of sewer explorers

Mr. Miscione remembers bearing through stench as a boy to fish in the sewers with metal clothes hangers for rubber balls lost during games of stickball. He said it was something of a "Brooklyn tradition."

"If it was fresh, you could get a pretty good, free ball that way," he said. "That's my only recollection of getting something valuable out of the New York City sewer system."

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