Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (15 page)

Community activists who had defeated the Lower Manhattan Expressway proposal rallied once more against this new highway proposal. The importance of the Lower Manhattan Expressway battle to the Westway saga is that anti-Westway activists could represent the proposal as the return of the old monster they had already slain. Never mind that Westway's design was an attempt to
avoid
the neighborhood-smashing of Robert Moses; the reform movement's collective memory requires the scenario that the same vampire arise anew in each succeeding generation.

So when Jane Jacobs, by now living in Toronto, was interviewed by
New York
magazine in 1978 about Westway, she attacked it not only on the basis that it was the second coming of the Lower Manhattan Expressway,
but that it was the third coming of the New York Regional Plan Committee's 1929 report, with its proposed crosstown expressways traversing Manhattan. “Westway is only one small piece of a plan that would, piece by piece, Los Angeles–ize New York. It's an old plan that dates back to 1929.” The advantage of a historical perspective is that an informed skeptic such as Jacobs can be appropriately on guard when newfangled ideas are proposed. The disadvantage is that one may be tempted to fight the old battles, ignoring important distinctions. “If Westway goes in, the Lower Manhattan Expressway will be revived,” she told her interviewer confidently, though such an outcome, decimating Greenwich Village and Soho, would have been extremely unlikely.

Meanwhile, Robert Moses, the chief advocate of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, now in semi-retirement, issued a paper calling the Westway proposal a “fiasco,” saying it would be too expensive, thereby incurring the resentment of Western and Southern congressmen, and that the better way was to repair the collapsed elevated roadway. “How much longer can such a shindig go on? Five years? Ten years? This is not orderly consideration. It is a mob dividing up stage money, an Anvil Chorus, a byword, a hissing and a yapping, a spectacle of bamboozlement. If this is the road to progress, I am the retired Gaekwar of Baroda,” Moses concluded colorfully. For once, Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses were in agreement. Both hated Westway.

But look who was
for
Westway: three United States presidents (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan) and every New York senator, governor, and mayor who served during its placement on the table (including such nationally recognized figures as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jacob Javits, Nelson Rockefeller, Hugh Carey, Mario Cuomo, John Lindsay, and Ed Koch), every construction and civil service union, the banks and business community, the three local daily newspapers, leading architectural critics (Ada Louise Huxtable, Paul Goldberger, Peter Blake), and various civic watchdog groups (Municipal Art Society, Citizens Housing and Planning Council)—all pressing to see this oddly visionary scheme become a reality. The Westway team was spearheaded by an undersecretary type with Washington influence (Lowell Bridwell), while able fixers like John Zuccotti, Abe Beame's deputy mayor, were working behind the
scenes. It was easy for anti-Westway groups to put a single label on this broad spectrum of agreement: the Establishment. Formidable official pressure was being brought to bear to get this project built, making the end result doubly surprising.

ALBERT BUTZEL, the attorney who may have done more than anyone else to defeat Westway, acknowledges today that the project was designed in such a way as to avoid controversy. “Nobody had anything against Westway's being on landfill back then, it looked like a win-win solution. In fact, the genius of the Westway proposal was that it didn't tear down anyone's house. I even thought the tunnel was a pretty good idea,” admitted Butzel. “It would bring people to the water. The fight back then was trading in highway funds for mass transit, shifting people back from cars to trains.”

Westway became a litmus test for whether you were pro–mass transit or highways. Marci Benstock, another indefatigable leader of the anti-Westway forces, told the press that the driving force motivating her was her love of the subways. No one could argue that New York's subway system was run-down and in need of massive infusions of capital. For ridership to rebound, the fleet of trains needed to be replaced by newer models, and the shabby stations given facelifts. Through recent federal legislation, sponsored by New York congresswoman Bella Abzug, a mechanism existed for highway funds to be traded in for mass transit. It would never amount to a dollar-for-dollar exchange; at most, thirty or forty cents on the dollar. The federal government and Congress, having committed over a billion dollars for Westway, was not about to take kindly to New York City's saying, “On second thought, we don't really want that highway you thought so much of, can you give us a billion for our subways instead?”

The mass-transit-versus-highways choice was, from the start, a false one, since any balanced regional system needed both. As a
New York Times
editorial put it: “We deem false the assumption that Westway is an alternative to mass transit and that the two modes are irreconcilable. Westway forms a most significant part of a total transportation strategy. It will accommodate deliveries and services that never take the subway.”

MUNICIPAL CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS that require a long while to win approval inevitably traverse several economic cycles, falling into and out of sync with the mood of the moment. So it was with Westway. Its redevelopment piece began as a way to boost a moribund area that needed development, then was transformed by a hot real estate market into something else. By the time the boom years of the 1980s had arrived, and there was a serious housing shortage, and co-ops in Greenwich Village, SoHo, and TriBeCa were going for sky-high prices, and plans were afoot to throw up hideous high-rise apartment buildings at the end of every block that overlooked the Hudson River, the notion of the city government promoting upscale residential and commercial development—on landfill, no less—seemed obscene.

The educated public's visceral disgust with developers was in part a specific historical reaction against the transformation of Manhattan into an overbuilt vertical pincushion, and in part a revulsion against the spectacle of greed in the eighties, a postindustrial greed that thrived on fiscal manipulations. Just as there were sardonic jokes about lawyers in the eighties, there were developer jokes. In that climate of growing anti-development sentiment, much opposition to Westway came simply from the suspicion that the real estate lobby stood to make a lot of money from it. I felt that way myself at the time, and was in the anti-Westway camp, without giving it much thought, in lockstep with my peer group. Today I would characterize my changed position by saying that while I am not delighted at the possibility that a large public work may end up lining some pockets, I am unwilling to cease advocating civic amenities out of resentment that they will enrich others. Developers can be harsh, exploitative, damaging to community values and aesthetics, ruthless to the poor, all true; but they can also build great cities. What else is New York City but a huge real estate development?

THE COALITION OF GROUPS opposed to Westway included Marci Benstock's Clean Air Campaign, Action for Rational Transit (a
Manhattan citizens group that later evolved into the Straphangers), and the Sierra Club, all of which used the lawsuit as their principal weapon. Under the Clean Water Act and the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act, the New York State Department of Transportation was required to obtain a permit to place landfill in the Hudson River. The decision was left to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to decide whether to grant a landfill permit. The anti-Westway coalition argued against the project, on the grounds that it would promote air pollution and inefficient use of energy resources (highways instead of mass transit).

In 1977 the Environmental Protection Agency issued a report describing Westway as “environmentally unsatisfactory,” and called for trading in the highway funds for mass transit. Years of lawsuits and delays followed; but the opponents of Westway were still never able to prove that the project would worsen air quality, at least to the satisfaction of the magistrate in charge, Judge Thomas P. Griesa of the U.S. District Court. In 1981 Judge Griesa dismissed all of the clean-air issues.

Albert Butzel remembers leaving the courtroom that day, thinking it was all over, they'd lost, Westway would get built. But a friendly soul asked him if he had seen the depositions by Michael Ludwig, a marine biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service. Looking them over, Butzel noticed a passage about the landfill potentially interfering with the striped bass's favorite wintering site. Until that point, no one had taken the issue of marine habitat seriously, perhaps assuming that the harbor was too polluted to support much fish life. It so happened, however, that Butzel knew something about striped bass, because the fish had helped him and his law firm win a previous case that blocked Consolidated Edison's power plant at Storm King Mountain. If anti-Westway groups could prove that the tunnel might have a negative impact on striped bass migrating to the ocean, they were back in business.

TO GRASP THE STRIPED BASS
'
S SIGNIFICANCE to the lower Hudson requires some background about the abuse of the harbor. For a good part of New York's history, its harbor was used as a sewer and a dump. “[T]he rotting carcasses of horses and cattle were simply tossed into the rivers surrounding the city, where they remained for weeks, stinking and bloated,
floating in and out with the tides,” wrote Benjamin Miller in his informative book about New York's garbage,
Fat of the Land.
While the river disposal of dead animals was prohibited shortly after 1850, open-decked scows continued to dump garbage and mud into the harbor.

In that same period (1850-1890) there was increasing concern about the encroachment of docks into the Hudson and East Rivers, past the agreed-upon 400-foot limit. “Garbage, dredge spoil, sewer waste, ballast from ships, cinders and other materials coming either from city sewers or from docking ships quickly filled in the spaces between piers. What happened then was predictable,” noted Marion J. Klawonn in
Cradle of the Corps.
“Dock owners simply extended their piers further out into the rivers in order to get into deeper water.” Had the trend continued, Manhattan's Hudson River piers would have been, by 1900, within a quarter-mile of the New Jersey shore. But in 1855 the New York State legislature established a commission to survey and map the entire New York Harbor, in order to recommend definitive limits. The federal River and Harbor Act of 1888 established lines in harbors beyond which no building could take place without a permit and permission of the Army Corps of Engineers.

All these progressive pieces of legislation did not prevent unofficial dumping from continuing, as it was impossible for the overextended harbor police to patrol everywhere and enforce the laws. More important, the harbor was continuing “to receive staggering amounts of raw sewage—by 1910 six hundred million gallons a day of untreated waste was being discharged from New York City alone,” according to John Waldman, in
Heartbeats in the Muck.
Seas of floating garbage and human fecal matter were washing back with the tides. Children who swam in the floating baths rimming New York were not protected from these incursions, and people caught typhoid fever from handling oysters, once a staple of the New York diet. Such were the good old days, before sewage treatment plants.

The harbor was polluted not merely by visible waste but, increasingly, by chemicals released by industry, such as dioxin, methane, and PCBs. No wonder many people had given up on New York's harbor, and assumed it to be biologically dead. But in 1972 (the same time the Westway proposal came into being), the Clean Water Act, one of the most radical pieces of legislation in our lifetime, was passed, and the Hudson River started to
heal. In 1988 the U.S. Congress passed the Marine Protection Act, forbidding the ocean dumping of refuse.

Today New York Harbor is probably cleaner than at any time in the past hundred years,
*
and many fish species long absent have returned. But even before the effects of this cleansing could be felt, there was much more piscine activity in the lower Hudson than anyone except for a few hardy fishermen knew about. In 1969, naturalist Robert Boyle could write, in his study
The Hudson River
(which became a kind of holy text to the opponents of Westway): “As of now, the biological productivity of the lower Hudson is staggering. Fishes are there by the millions, with marine and freshwater species often side by side in the same patch of water. All told, the populations of fishes utilizing the lower Hudson for spawning, nursery, or feeding grounds comprise the greatest single wildlife resource in New York State. It is also the most neglected resource,” he added.

The main reason for the fecundity of the lower Hudson, according to Boyle, is that it is an estuary, where ocean and fresh water merge. “Nothing ever really goes to waste in an estuary…. The rocking action of the tides keeps the lower Hudson stirred like a thick soup…. In essence, the Hudson estuary is a nutrient trap, a protein plant, a self-perpetuating fertilizer factory …a kind of Times Square” for fishes.

The Federal Highway Administration, in its 1977 report for the Environmental Impact Statement, described the Westway area as “biologically impoverished” and “almost devoid of macroorganism.” The FHA and other pro-Westway agencies were obviously minimizing the loss of fish habitat so as to get on with the construction job at hand. To counter that stance, it was important for the anti-Westway coalition to demonstrate that the lower Hudson adjacent to Manhattan was still swarming with fish. But not just any fish: though plenty of winter flounder and tomcod could be found in New York Harbor, the case against Westway was built around the striped bass, because it was the premier recreational fish,
the glamour fish of the East Coast. Its pursuit was big business; hundreds of charter boats and many coastal communities in the Chesapeake Bay, Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey catered to those who, as Boyle put it, “sacrifice their jobs, their marriage, and even their sacred honor to fish for stripers.”