NEW YORK, NY.- Albert K. Butzel, an unflinching lawyer who, by defeating giant public works projects that endangered the environment, benefited millions of beleaguered New York City subway riders and untold numbers of striped bass returning to spawn in the Hudson River, died on Jan. 26 in Seattle. He was 85.
He died after falling at an assisted living facility, where he was being treated for Parkinson’s disease, his daughter Kyra Butzel said.
As wispy and unprepossessing as he could be caustic and cavalier, Butzel was regarded as a shrewd legal tactician who was instrumental in blocking Westway, a $4 billion federally financed landfill and highway project, first proposed in 1971, that would have run along the Hudson River, from the Battery north to West 42nd Street.
He also helped bury a plan by Consolidated Edison to embed the world’s largest pumped-storage hydroelectric plant in Storm King Mountain, in the Hudson Highlands.
“Westway never would have been defeated without Al,” Mitchell Bernard, who collaborated with him on the legal strategy and is now chief counsel of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an email. “Whatever one thinks about the merits of Westway, it was a remarkable win for citizen-based advocacy.”
After devoting 15 years to fighting Storm King and eight years litigating against Westway, Butzel told The New Yorker in 1997, “My history is a Hudson River history.”
He was no not-in-my-backyard obstructionist, though.
Once Westway was declared legally dead in 1985, he headed a coalition that helped transform derelict piers into what is now Hudson River Park, a greenway and esplanade along the riverfront stretching from Pier 97 in the Clinton neighborhood on the West Side to Pier 25 in Tribeca.
“After 150 years, the waterfront has become the public’s domain again,” Butzel wrote in the foreword to “Lost Waterfront: The Decline and Rebirth of Manhattan’s Western Shore” (2007), by Shelley Seccombe, “and an extraordinary one.”
While former Gov. Mario Cuomo famously predicted that the Westway controversy, as feverish as it was, would eventually evanesce “like a walnut in the batter of eternity,” each of Butzel’s successful legal challenges to preserve the Hudson River would reverberate beyond current events.
The 1965 ruling in the Storm King case, brought by conservation group Scenic Hudson, was hailed at the time as the birth of environmental law. It was among the earliest court decisions that granted citizens legal standing to sue to enforce environmental protection regulations.
The defeat of Westway signaled the endurance of grassroots political power and the abiding backlash against Robert Moses’ bulldozer diplomacy in building public works.
And thanks to a second front waged by mass transit advocates and New York politicians in Washington, the city government was empowered to swap about $1 billion in federal funds earmarked for Westway to subsidize the city’s ramshackle subway and bus system instead.
At one point or another, the fate of both projects hinged on the risks they posed to the breeding grounds of the striped bass, which was later named New York state’s official saltwater fish. The fish live in coastal waters and return to spawn in the fresh water of the Hudson every spring.
Westway was doomed once it became clear during the court challenge that official environmental impact statements had inexcusably and even fraudulently belittled the impact on the fish nursery of dumping 220 acres of landfill into the river to undergird the Westway, a portion of which would have tunneled under parkland.
Westway was finally defeated by homegrown environmentalists and foes of further development. They campaigned for a decade against an implacable but ill-prepared bloc of New York’s political and corporate establishment.
Butzel was later chair of the Hudson River Park Alliance, a coalition of 35 environmental and community groups that pressed for the creation of Hudson River Park.
The coalition successfully proposed that a state authority be established to build the park and then sustain it by extracting fees and other revenue from private real estate development along the river, rather than letting it be subject to annual fluctuations in the city budget. In 1998, the state Legislature created the Hudson River Park Trust to design, build, operate and maintain the park by drawing on a variety of revenue sources.
Butzel’s support of even any development to help subsidize the park caused an irreparable breach with one of his former allies, Marcy Benstock, whose Clean Air Campaign was among the groups Butzel had represented against Westway and who, herself, was a principal player in the project’s defeat. But he prevailed.
“There seemed to be no argument he couldn’t win, no trap he couldn’t wriggle out of, no adversary he couldn’t outwit,” Charles Komanoff, a former city environmental analyst, wrote last year in the Citizens Union online journal, Gotham Gazette. “Not just the smartest guy in the room, he was the most effective.”
Albert Kahn Butzel was born on Oct. 1, 1938, in Birmingham, Michigan, north of Detroit. His father, Martin Butzel, was a lawyer. His mother, Rosalie (Kahn) Butzel, was the daughter of Detroit architect Albert Kahn and was active in civic and philanthropic groups.
After attending the Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Butzel graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1960 and from Harvard Law School in 1961.
That year, he married Brenda Fay Sosland, a clinical social worker, who survives him along with their daughters, Laura and Kyra Butzel; four grandchildren; and his brother Leo. Another brother, John, died earlier. Butzel and his wife had moved to Seattle, where their daughter Kyra lives, for long term care.
After law school, Butzel joined Paul, Weiss, Rifkind & Garrison, where Lloyd Garrison recruited him for the law firm’s pro bono representation of Scenic Hudson. In 1971, he formed a law partnership with Peter A.A. Berle, who would later become the state environmental commissioner.
Butzel told The New York Times in 2000 that as a lawyer’s son he “felt obligated to be a lawyer, but it was nothing I pined to do.”
“It scared me — it’s so confrontational,” he added.
Bernard, whom Butzel mentored for the courtroom combat over Westway, described him, though, as “an unorthodox and brilliant lawyer, hardworking, tenacious and committed.”
Butzel later enlisted in campaigns to preserve open space on Governors Island and to build Brooklyn Bridge Park.
While working in New York he lived in a Park Avenue apartment, “in some measure thanks to family money, surrounded by antiques and paintings,” the Times wrote in a profile of him.
After litigating most of the case against Westway, Butzel left his law practice full time to pursue his passion for writing. He turned out several short stories and a novel, displaying a talent for prose that had earlier been glimpsed in his lawyer’s work.
“His briefs were stories that brought technical scientific and legal evidence to life, giving it a human face,” Bernard said. “And utterly humble. I’ve never known a litigator as good as he was who personally disliked litigation as much as he did.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
