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Albert Ok. Butzel, an unflinching lawyer who, by defeating large public works initiatives that endangered the setting, benefited hundreds of thousands of beleaguered New York Metropolis subway riders and untold numbers of striped bass returning to spawn within the Hudson River, died on Jan. 26 in Seattle. He was 85.
He died after falling at an assisted dwelling facility, the place he was being handled for Parkinson’s illness, his daughter Kyra Butzel mentioned.
As wispy and unprepossessing as he may very well be caustic and cavalier, Mr. Butzel (pronounced BUTTS-uhl) was considered a shrewd authorized tactician who was instrumental in blocking Westway, a $4 billion federally-financed landfill and freeway undertaking, first proposed in 1971, that will have run alongside the Hudson River, from the Battery north to West forty second Road.
He additionally helped bury a plan by Consolidated Edison to embed the world’s largest pumped-storage hydroelectric plant in Storm King Mountain, within the Hudson Highlands.
“Westway by no means would have been defeated with out Al,” Mitchell Bernard, who collaborated with him on the authorized technique and is now chief counsel of the Pure Sources Protection Council, mentioned in an electronic mail. “No matter one thinks concerning the deserves of Westway, it was a exceptional win for citizen-based advocacy.”
After devoting 15 years to preventing Storm King and eight years litigating in opposition to Westway, Mr. Butzel informed The New Yorker in 1997, “My historical past is a Hudson River historical past.”
He was no not-in-my-backyard obstructionist, although.
As soon as Westway was declared legally lifeless in 1985, he headed a coalition that helped remodel derelict piers into what’s now Hudson River Park, a greenway and esplanade alongside the riverfront stretching from Pier 97 within the Clinton neighborhood on the West Aspect to Pier 25 in Tribeca.
“After 150 years, the waterfront has turn out to be the general public’s area once more,” Mr. Butzel wrote within the foreword to “Misplaced Waterfront: The Decline and Rebirth of Manhattan’s Western Shore” (2007), by Shelley Seccombe, “and a rare one.”
Whereas former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo famously predicted that the Westway controversy, as feverish because it was, would ultimately evanesce “like a walnut within the batter of eternity,” every of Mr. Butzel’s profitable authorized challenges to protect the Hudson River would reverberate past present occasions.
The 1965 ruling within the Storm King case, introduced by the conservation group Scenic Hudson, was hailed on the time because the delivery of environmental legislation. It was among the many earliest court docket choices that granted residents authorized standing to sue to implement environmental safety laws.
The defeat of Westway signaled the endurance of grass roots political energy and the abiding backlash in opposition to Robert Moses’s bulldozer diplomacy in constructing public works.
And because of a second entrance waged by mass transit advocates and New York politicians in Washington, town authorities was empowered to swap about $1 billion in federal funds already earmarked for Westway to subsidize town’s ramshackle subway and bus system as a substitute.
At one level or one other, the destiny of each initiatives hinged on the dangers they posed to the breeding grounds of the striped bass, which was later named New York State’s official saltwater fish. The fish dwell in coastal waters and return to spawn within the recent water of the Hudson each spring.
Westway was doomed as soon as it turned clear in the course of the court docket problem that official environmental affect statements had inexcusably and even fraudulently belittled the affect on the fish nursery of dumping 220 acres of landfill into the river to undergird the Westway, a portion of which might have tunneled underneath parkland.
Westway was lastly defeated by homegrown environmentalists and foes of additional growth. They campaigned for a decade in opposition to an implacable however ill-prepared bloc of New York’s political and company institution.
Mr. Butzel was later chairman of the Hudson River Park Alliance, a coalition of 35 environmental and group teams that pressed for the creation of the Hudson River Park.
The coalition efficiently proposed {that a} state authority be established to construct the park after which maintain it by extracting charges and different income from personal actual property growth alongside the river, reasonably than letting or not it’s topic to the annual fluctuations within the metropolis funds. In 1998, the State Legislature created the Hudson River Park Belief to design, construct, function and preserve the park by drawing on a wide range of income sources.
Mr. Butzel’s help of even any growth to assist subsidize the park precipitated an irreparable breach with one in every of his former allies, Marcy Benstock, whose Clear Air Marketing campaign was among the many teams Mr. Butzel had represented in opposition to Westway and who, herself, was a principal participant within the undertaking’s defeat. However he prevailed.
“There gave the impression to be no argument he couldn’t win, no lure he couldn’t wriggle out of, no adversary he couldn’t outwit,” Charles Komanoff, a former metropolis environmental analyst, wrote final 12 months within the Residents Union on-line journal, Gotham Gazette. “Not simply the neatest man within the room, he was the simplest.”
Alfred Kahn Butzel was born on Oct. 1, 1938, in Birmingham, Mich., north of Detroit. His father, Martin Butzel, was a lawyer. His mom, Rosalie (Kahn) Butzel, was the daughter of the Detroit architect Albert Kahn and was lively in civic and philanthropic teams.
After attending the Cranbrook Colleges in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Mr. Butzel graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s diploma in English in 1960 and from Harvard Regulation Faculty in 1961.
That very same 12 months, he married Brenda Fay Sosland, a medical social employee, who survives him together with their daughters, Laura and Kyra Butzel; 4 grandchildren; and his brother Leo. One other brother, John, died earlier.
After legislation college, Mr. Butzel joined Paul, Weiss, Rifkind & Garrison, the place Lloyd Garrison recruited him for the legislation agency’s professional bono illustration of Scenic Hudson. In 1971, he fashioned a legislation partnership with Peter A.A. Berle, who would later turn out to be the state environmental commissioner.
Mr. Butzel informed The New York Occasions in 2000 that as a lawyer’s son he “felt obligated to be a lawyer, nevertheless it was nothing I pined to do.”
“It scared me — it’s so confrontational,” he added.
Mr. Bernard, whom Mr. Butzel mentored for the courtroom fight over Westway, described him, although, as “an unorthodox and sensible lawyer, hard-working, tenacious, and dedicated.”
Mr. Butzel later enlisted in campaigns to protect open area on Governors Island and to construct Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Whereas working in New York he lived in a Park Avenue residence, “in some measure due to household cash, surrounded by antiques and work,” The Occasions wrote in a profile of him.
After litigating many of the case in opposition to Westway, Mr. Butzel left his legislation observe full-time to pursue his ardour for writing. He turned out a number of brief tales and a novel, displaying a expertise for prose that had earlier been glimpsed in his lawyer’s work.
“His briefs had been tales that introduced technical scientific and authorized proof to life, giving it a human face,” Mr. Bernard mentioned. “And completely humble. I’ve by no means recognized a litigator nearly as good as he was who personally disliked litigation as a lot as he did.”
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