He set up a shop of underthirty aides, jauntily characterized by architectural critic Peter Blake as "Ratensky's Raiders," jd they took on the problem of what to do with the West Side Highway, b ild'team C°nSere< several options: restoring the elevated highway, nS a new highway at street level, sinking a new highway along West Cet Wlth a deck over it, or the "outboard" solution-to build the high way in the river, alongside the waterfront-which was the one final] chosen. Craig Whitaker, then twentynine, fresh from Yale architecture scho0[ and the Peace Corps, played a large part in developing the "outboard" plai) first called Wateredge. Originally the team had toyed with the idea of building a highway on pilings, but the federal highway officials had wanted it placed in a box, so they came up with the inspiration, as Whitaker likes to say, to "drop it in the drink." Now a slight, professoriallooking man with thinning hair and pensive blue eyes, who teaches at NYU and wrote a book called Architecture and the American Dream, Whitaker seems a thoughtful survivor, less bitter than bemused. Westway is his Moby Dick, the whale that took thirteen years of his life. Having made more than 700 presentations to groups advocating the plan, and having spent years fighting to get it built, he is in no hurry to simplify the complexities of the battle story. He has devised a Westway slide show for his students, and his architectural office on lower Broadway contains what certainly must be the world's largest archive of Westwayiana. "Look, no sane person would have erected an atgrade or elevated highway again at the edge. The beauty of dropping it in the drink was that this way you got a broad new area, and people could walk to the water without being cut off from the highway. There was lots of parkland acreage. Landfill, yes. So what?" It would not eviscerate neighborhoods or cause massive relocation, nor would it tie up traffic for years with construction, since the downtown part of the old West Side Highway could continue to function at street level until Westway was opened. But, most important, it would bring people back to the Hudson, without having to cross a major highway. As Whitaker tells it, Sam Ratensky got Ed Logue interested in the redesign. "Ratensky and Logue were rivals, but Sam was ill-dying of brain cancer-and about to retire. So Logue, who liked the outboard idea, hired Sam's whole crew, including me, into UDC, and Sam retired. The project now had a formidable protector in Logue. "I was delegated to make the presentation to Governor Rockefeller. I was still pretty young, and no one knew me from Adam. But as soon as Rockefeller heard the word 'tunnel,' he went for it." Whitaker pauses Ш on OR THE BATTLE OF WESTWAY 85 OUTBOARD. th ught like a general recalling ancient errors of military strategy: "It Zuccotti [then Chairman of the City Planning Commission] vvaS wjth the name 'Westway.