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Issue of the Week
 
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Marcy Benstock Fights Again

When people think of New York's waterfront, certain figures come to mind: Walt Whitman (City of hurried and sparkling waters! City of spires and masts! City nested in bays! My city! ), Herman Melville (Right and left, the streets take you waterward) and Marcy Benstock (Go to court!).

Benstock, who heads the Clean Air Campaign, first came to the public's attention in her fight against Westway, the vast, expensive project proposed in the 1970's to rebuild the West Side Highway below 34th Street as a highway and a river development project that would have filled in up to 264 acres of the Hudson River. The mayor, the governor and the two U.S. senators all supported the plan.

Benstock made a federal case of it. Her Clean Air Campaign was one of the plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn the permits granted by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. "Westway would have wasted federal funds, it would have been a fiscal and environmental disaster, it would have destroyed an irreplaceable habitat of more than 100 species of fish," Benstock says, her outrage decades later diminished not one decibel.

The federal courts ruled in favor of Benstock and the other plaintiffs. The federal funding that had been earmarked for the project eventually went into mass transit and substitute road projects. By 1985, Westway was officially dead. Along with hundreds of other civic leaders and environmental activists, Benstock became the David that had defeated Goliath.

So what does Benstock think of all the new plans for the waterfront, especially Hudson River Park, which is going where Westway would have?

"It's the same kind of project," she says. "And it's illegal in the same way." And she is fighting it in the same way. "I'm preparing for litigation. The only fair arena where citizens can fight environmentally damaging boondoggles now is in the federal courts."

She is not alone in opposing Hudson River Park, which she sees not as a park but as a development project, a boon to developers. The local Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and other environmental groups have dubbed it Son-of-Westway. What they all want instead, Benstock says, is "a genuine waterfront park that preserves the river."

"The point about the Hudson River is this: We want the Hudson River left alone. No Army Corps permits are required to leave a river alone."

Benstock said she was too busy with the legal case to discuss her opposition in any more detail. But she did fax over three articles from the Wall Street Journal that were critical of the Hudson River Park, and of other development plans for the waterfront. "Round Manhattan II: The Hiker Strikes Back" described the park as "a $400 million Boondoggle" for the politically connected. "A Greenway Scorched" said there was a need to "stabilize the piers," but not tear up the river. "The Floating Guggenheim" condemned the museum's plans to build a new branch, designed by Frank Gehry, jutting into the East River.

As for the other waterfront projects? "I have no opinion about parks, if they're real parks," she said. "I love real parks. " What she doesn't like, she says, is a development project masquerading as a park. "You might as well call the World Trade Center a park."

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