No w°nder many people had given up on New York's harbor, and assumed it t0 be biologically dead. But in T972 (the same time the Westway proposal Came into being), the Clean Water Act, one of the most radical pieces of legislation in our lifetime, was passed, and the Hudson River started to heal. In 1988 the U.S. Congress passed the Marine Protection Act, forbidding the ocean dumping of refuse. Today New York Harbor is probably cleaner than at any time in the past hundred years, and many fish species long absent have returned. But even before the effects of this cleansing could be felt, there was much more piscine activity in the lower Hudson than anyone except for a few hardy fishermen knew about. In 1969, naturalist Robert Boyle could write, in his study The Hudson River (which became a kind of holy text to the opponents of Westway): "As of now, the biological productivity of the lower Hudson is staggering. Fishes are there by the millions, with marine and freshwater species often side by side in the same patch of water. AH told, the populations of fishes utilizing the lower Hudson for spawning, nursery, or feeding grounds comprise the greatest single wildlife resource in New York State. It is also the most neglected resource," he added. The main reason for the fecundity of the lower Hudson, according to Boyle, is that it is an estuary, where ocean and fresh water merge. "Nothing ever really goes to waste in an estuary. . . . The rocking action of the tides keeps the lower Hudson stirred like a thick soup. ... In essence, the Hudson estuary is a nutrient trap, a protein plant, a selfperpetuating fertilizer factory ... a kind of Times Square" for fishes. The Federal Highway Administration, in its 1977 report for the Environmental Impact Statement, described the Westway area as "biologically impoverished" and "almost devoid of macroorganism." The FHA and other proWestway agencies were obviously minimizing the loss of fish habitat so as to get on with the construction job at hand. To counter that stance, it was important for the antiWestway coalition to demonstrate that the lower Hudson adjacent to Manhattan was still swarming with fish. But not just any fish: though plenty of winter flounder and tom cod could be found in New York Harbor, the case against Westway was built around the striped bass, because it was the premier recreational fish, „ л д R D OR THE BATTLE OF WESTWAY 99 oUTBOAKL,, jj, glamour fish of the East Coast. Its pursuit was big business; hundreds f charter boats and many coastal communities in the Chesapeake Bay, Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey catered to those who, as Boyle ut it "sacrifice their jobs, their marriage, and even their sacred honor to fish for stripers." Curiously, very few sportsmen sought out stripers along the Hudson, in spite of the fact that, according to Boyle's 1969 estimate, the river held approximately 17 million striped bass, or 10 to 20 percent of the total run along the inshore Atlantic coast.