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Albert Okay. Butzel, an unflinching lawyer who, by defeating large public works tasks that endangered the surroundings, benefited tens of millions 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 stated.
As wispy and unprepossessing as he could possibly 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 mission, 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, stated in an electronic mail. “No matter one thinks in regards to 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 towards 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 rework 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 grow 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 unprecedented one.”
Whereas former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo famously predicted that the Westway controversy, as feverish because it was, would finally 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 start of environmental regulation. It was among the many earliest courtroom selections 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 towards Robert Moses’s bulldozer diplomacy in constructing public works.
And due to a second entrance waged by mass transit advocates and New York politicians in Washington, the town authorities was empowered to swap about $1 billion in federal funds already earmarked for Westway to subsidize the town’s ramshackle subway and bus system as an alternative.
At one level or one other, the destiny of each tasks 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 courtroom 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 below parkland.
Westway was lastly defeated by homegrown environmentalists and foes of additional improvement. They campaigned for a decade towards 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 improvement alongside the river, fairly 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 keep the park by drawing on quite a lot of income sources.
Mr. Butzel’s help of even any improvement to assist subsidize the park precipitated an irreparable breach with considered one of his former allies, Marcy Benstock, whose Clear Air Marketing campaign was among the many teams Mr. Butzel had represented towards Westway and who, herself, was a principal participant within the mission’s defeat. However he prevailed.
“There appeared to be no argument he couldn’t win, no entice he couldn’t wriggle out of, no adversary he couldn’t outwit,” Charles Komanoff, a former metropolis environmental analyst, wrote final yr 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 yr, he married Brenda Fay Sosland, a scientific 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 regulation college, Mr. Butzel joined Paul, Weiss, Rifkind & Garrison, the place Lloyd Garrison recruited him for the regulation agency’s professional bono illustration of Scenic Hudson. In 1971, he shaped a regulation partnership with Peter A.A. Berle, who would later grow 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, but it surely 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 good 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 condo, “in some measure due to household cash, surrounded by antiques and work,” The Occasions wrote in a profile of him.
After litigating a lot of the case towards Westway, Mr. Butzel left his regulation apply full-time to pursue his ardour for writing. He turned out a number of quick tales and a novel, displaying a expertise for prose that had earlier been glimpsed in his lawyer’s work.
“His briefs have been tales that introduced technical scientific and authorized proof to life, giving it a human face,” Mr. Bernard stated. “And totally humble. I’ve by no means recognized a litigator pretty much as good as he was who personally disliked litigation as a lot as he did.”
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