Albert K. Butzel, lawyer and protector of the Hudson, dies at age 85

Albert K. Butzel, a fearless lawyer who, by defeating massive public works projects that endangered the environment, benefited millions of beleaguered New York City subway riders and countless numbers of striped bass returning to spawn in the Hudson River , died January 26 in Seattle. He was 85.

He died after a fall 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 arrogant, Mr. Butzel (pronounced BUTTS-uhl) was considered a shrewd legal tactician who was instrumental in blocking Westway, a government-funded landfill and highway project of $4 billion, first proposed in 1971. , which 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 build the world's largest hydroelectric power plant. Storm King Mountainin the Hudson Highlands.

“Westway would never have been defeated without Al,” Mitchell Bernard, who worked with him on the legal strategy and is now chief counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an email. “Whatever you think of Westway's merits, it was a remarkable victory for citizen initiatives.”

After spending 15 years fighting Storm King and eight years litigating Westway, Mr. Butzel told The New Yorker in 1997: “My history is a history of the Hudson River.”

However, he was not an obstructionist who was not in my backyard.

When Westway was declared legally dead in 1985, he led a coalition that helped transform abandoned piers into what is now Hudson River Park, a riverside greenway and boulevard stretching from Pier 97 in the Clinton neighborhood to the West Side to Pier 25 in Tribeca. .

“After 150 years, the waterfront has once again become the public domain,” Mr. 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 M. Cuomo famously predicted that the Westway controversy, feverish as it was, would eventually fade away “like a walnut in the batter of eternity,” each of Mr. Butzel's successful legal challenges to the Hudson River resonate. beyond current events.

The 1965 ruling in the Storm King case, filed by the conservation group Scenic Hudson, was hailed at the time as the birth of environmental law. It was one of the first court decisions to grant citizens legal authority to sue to enforce environmental protection regulations.

Westway's defeat was a sign of the survival of grassroots political power and of continued resistance to Robert Moses' bulldozer diplomacy in building public works.

And thanks to a second front of transit advocates and New York politicians in Washington, the city government was given the authority to swap about $1 billion in federal funds already earmarked for Westway to replace the city's rickety subway and bus system. subsidize the city.

At one point, the fate of both projects depended on the risks they posed to the breeding grounds of the striped bass, later named the official saltwater fish of New York State. The fish live in coastal waters and return each spring to spawn in the freshwater of the Hudson.

Westway was doomed when it became clear during the trial that official environmental impact statements had inexcusably and even fraudulently belittled the impact on the fish farm of dumping 220 hectares of landfill into the river to support the Westway, part of which would have been tunnelled underwater. park landscape.

Westway was ultimately defeated by homegrown environmentalists and enemies of further development. They spent a decade campaigning against an implacable but ill-prepared bloc of New York's political and business establishment.

Mr. Butzel later served as chairman of the Hudson River Park Alliance, a coalition of 35 environmental and community groups that pushed for the creation of the Hudson River Park.

The coalition successfully proposed that a state authority be created to build and then maintain the park by obtaining fees and other revenue from private real estate development along the river, rather than making it 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 using a variety of revenue sources.

Mr. Butzel's support for even a development to help subsidize the park caused an irreparable rift with one of his former allies, Marcy Benstock, whose Clean Air Campaign was one of the groups Mr. Butzel had represented against Westway and which himself was one of the most important leaders. player in the defeat of the project. But he had the upper hand.

“There seemed to be no argument he couldn't win, no trap he couldn't escape, no opponent he couldn't outsmart,” Charles Komanoff, a former urban environmental analyst, wrote last year in the online magazine Citizens Union . , Gotham Gazette. “Not only was he the smartest man in the room, he was also the most effective.”

Alfred Kahn Butzel was born on October 1, 1938 in Birmingham, Michigan, north of Detroit. His father, Martin Butzel, was a lawyer. His mother, Rosalie (Kahn) Butzel, was the daughter of the Detroit architect Albert Kahn and was active in civic and philanthropic groups.

After attending Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Mr. Butzel graduated from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in English in 1960 and from Harvard Law School in 1961.

That same 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.

After law school, Mr. Butzel joined Paul, Weiss, Rifkind & Garrison, where Lloyd Garrison recruited him to the law firm's pro bono representation of Scenic Hudson. In 1971, he formed a legal partnership with Peter AA Berle, who would later become the state environmental commissioner.

Mr. Butzel told the New York Times in 2000 that as the son of a lawyer, he “felt obligated to be a lawyer, but that wasn't anything I desired.”

“It scared me; it's so confrontational,” he added.

However, Mr. Bernard, who was mentored by Mr. Butzel during the court battle over Westway, described him as “an unorthodox and brilliant lawyer, hardworking, tenacious and dedicated.”

Mr. Butzel later participated in campaigns to preserve open space on Governors Island and build Brooklyn Bridge Park.

While working in New York, he lived in an apartment on Park Avenue, “thanks in some measure to family money, surrounded by antiques and paintings,” The Times wrote in a profile of him.

After litigating most of the case against Westway, Mr. Butzel left his law practice full-time to pursue his passion for writing. He published several short stories and a novel, demonstrating a talent for prose previously reflected in his lawyer's work.

“His briefs were stories that brought technical scientific and legal evidence to life, giving it a human face,” Mr Bernard said. “And extremely modest. I have never known such a good litigator as him, who personally hated litigation as much as he did.”