From 1971 to 1985, battles raged over Westway, a multibillion-dollar highway, development, and park project slated for placement in New York City. It would have projected far into the Hudson River, including massive new landfill extending several miles along Manhattan’s Lower West Side. The most expensive highway project ever proposed, Westway also provoked one of the highest stakes legal battles of its day. In Fighting Westway, William W. Buzbee reveals how environmentalists, citizens, their lawyers, and a growing opposition coalition, despite enormous resource disparities, were able to defeat this project supported by presidents, senators, governors, and mayors, much of the business community, and most unions. Although Westway’s defeat has been derided as lacking justification, Westway’s critics raised substantial and ultimately decisive objections. They questioned claimed project benefits and advocated trading federal Westway dollars for mass transit improvements. They also exposed illegally disregarded environmental risks, especially to increasingly scarce East Coast young striped bass often found in extraordinarily high numbers right where Westway was to be built.
Drawing on archival records and interviews, Buzbee goes beyond the veneer of government actions and court rulings to illuminate the stakes, political pressures, and strategic moves and countermoves that shaped the Westway war, a fight involving all levels and branches of government, scientific conflict, strategic citizen action, and hearings, trials, and appeals in federal court. This Westway history illuminates how high-stakes regulatory battles are fought, the strategies and power of America’s environmental laws, ways urban priorities are contested, the clout of savvy citizen activists and effective lawyers, and how separation of powers and federalism frameworks structure legal and political conflict. Whether readers seek an exciting tale of environmental, political, and legal conflict, to learn what really happened during these battles that transformed New York City, or to understand how modern legal frameworks shape high stakes regulatory wars, Fighting Westway will provide a good read.
William W. Buzbee is Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law and will be joining the law faculty at Georgetown University Law Center in the fall of 2014. He is coauthor of Environmental Protection: Law and Policy and editor of Preemption Choice: The Theory, Law, and Reality of Federalism's Core Question. He has published in many leading law reviews.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1 The Westway Plan 2 Highways, Subways, and the Seeds of Dissent 3 The Art of Regulatory War 4 The Road Warriors and the New Environment 5 Searching for Westway's Achilles' Heel: Air Pollution? 6 Westway’s Fill and America’s Protected Waters 7 The Public Fish Story 8 Enter the Independent Federal Judiciary and the Power of Law 9 Reexamining the 1971–1982 Debacles10 Westway’s Second Chance 11 The Trial Crucible 12 The Cross-Examination 13 Judgment Days 14 Assessing Westway’s Outcome Epilogue: If Westway Were Proposed Today?
What People are Saying About This
Elizabeth L. Bradley
William W. Buzbee's absorbing history unearths the complex and fascinating events, personalities, and regulations that conspired to create one of New York's most public failures of city planning—and one of its most memorable triumphs of citizen activism. At the beginning of a new mayoral administration, this book is a timely reminder that urban advocacy is never out of fashion in the city that never sleeps.
John H. Adams
Finally! The first thorough, truthful account of one of the great environmental battles of the twentieth century! William W. Buzbee captures in rigorous detail the successful fight a group of dedicated citizens waged against the major economic and political powers of the day. Westway was a victory for honesty, principle, and the rule of law. Long live the Clean Water Act and the Hudson River striped bass!
Ann L. Buttenwieser
Finally we have a much-needed historical analysis of the embattled West Side Highway Project, known as Westway. It's a page-turner as the reader seeks reasons for, and the outcome of, the wars that were fought over the future of Lower Manhattan’s Hudson River waterfront from the 1971 Plan to the conclusive court decision. William W. Buzbee has amalgamated governmental, political, civic, and legal documents and interviews with participants into an insightful and thought-provoking story about the travails of a large physical project in the post-Robert Moses era.
