The educated public's visceral disgust with developers was in part a specific historical reaction against the transformation of Manhattan into an overbuilt vertical pincushion, and in part a revulsion against the spectacle of greed in the eighties, a postindustrial greed that thrived on fiscal manipulations. Just as there were sardonic jokes about lawyers in the eighties, there were developer jokes. In that climate of growing anti development sentiment, much opposition to Westway came simply from the suspicion that the real estate lobby stood to make a lot of money from it. I felt that way myself at the time, and was in the antiWestway camp, without giving it much thought, in lockstep with my peer group. Today I would characterize my changed position by saying that while I am not delighted at the possibility that a large public work may end up lining some pockets, I am unwilling to cease advocating civic amenities out of resentment that they will enrich others. Developers can be harsh, exploitative, damaging to community values and aesthetics, ruthless to the poor, all true; but they can also build great cities. What else is New York City but a huge real estate development? HE C°ALITION OF GROUPS opposed to Westway included Marci Penstock's Clean Air Campaign, Action for Rational Transit (a Manhattan citizens group that later evolved into the Straphangers), and the Sierra Club, all of which used the lawsuit as their principal weapon Under the Clean Water Act and the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act, the New York State Department of Transportation was required to obtain a permit to place landfill in the Hudson River. The decision was left to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to decide whether to grant a landfill permit. The antiWestway coalition argued against the project, on the grounds that it would promote air pollution and inefficient use of energy resources (highways instead of mass transit). In 1977 the Environmental Protection Agency issued a report describing Westway as "environmentally unsatisfactory," and called for trading in the highway funds for mass transit. Years of lawsuits and delays followed; but the opponents of Westway were still never able to prove that the project would worsen air quality, at least to the satisfaction of the magistrate in charge, Judge Thomas P. Griesa of the U.S. District Court. In 1981 Judge Griesa dismissed all of the cleanair issues. Albert Butzel remembers leaving the courtroom that day, thinking it was all over, they'd lost, Westway would get built. But a friendly soul asked him if he had seen the depositions by Michael Ludwig, a marine biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service. Looking them over, Butzel noticed a passage about the landfill potentially interfering with the striped bass's favorite wintering site. Until that point, no one had taken the issue of marine habitat seriously, perhaps assuming that the harbor was too polluted to support much fish life.