It so happened, however, that Butzel knew something about striped bass, because the fish had helped him and his law firm win a previous case that blocked Consolidated Edison's power plant at Storm King Mountain. If antiWestway groups could prove that the tunnel might have a negative impact on striped bass migrating to the ocean, they were back in business. To GRASP THE STRIPED BASS'S s I GNI FI С AN С E to the lower Hudson requires some background about the abuse of the harbor. For a good part of New York's history, its harbor was used as a sewer and a dump. "[T]he rotting carcasses of horses and cattle were simply tossed into the rivers sui rounding the city, where they remained for weeks, stinking and bloated, о л Д R D OR THE BATTLE OF WESTWAY 97 • p in and out with the tides," wrote Benjamin Miller in his infor floating ative book about New York's garbage, Fat of the Land. While the rivei disposal of dead animals was prohibited shortly after 1850, opendeckec scows continued to dump garbage and mud into the harbor. In that same period (18501890) there was increasing concern about the encroachment of docks into the Hudson and East Rivers, past the agreed upon 400foot limit. "Garbage, dredge spoil, sewer waste, ballast frorr ships cinders and other materials coming either from city sewers or fron docking ships quickly filled in the spaces between piers. What happenec then was predictable," noted Marion J. Klawonn in Cradle of the Corps. "Dock owners simply extended their piers further out into the rivers in order to get into deeper water." Had the trend continued, Manhattan's Hudson River piers would have been, by 1900, within a quartermile oi the New Jersey shore. But in 1855 the New York State legislature established a commission to survey and map the entire New York Harbor, ir order to recommend definitive limits. The federal River and Harbor Act of 1888 established lines in harbors beyond which no building could take place without a permit and permission of the Army Corps of Engineers. AH these progressive pieces of legislation did not prevent unofficial dumping from continuing, as it was impossible for the overextended harbor police to patrol everywhere and enforce the laws. More important, the harbor was continuing "to receive staggering amounts of raw sewage-by 1910 six hundred million gallons a day of untreated waste was being discharged from New York City alone," according to John Waldman, in Heartbeats in the Muck. Seas of floating garbage and human fecal mattei were washing back with the tides. Children who swam in the floating baths rimming New York were not protected from these incursions, and people caught typhoid fever from handling oysters, once a staple of the New York diet. Such were the good old days, before sewage treatment plants. The harbor was polluted not merely by visible waste but, increasingly by chemicals released by industry, such as dioxin, methane, and PCBs.