Suszkowski himself was against Westway at the time, on the grounds that there were viable cheaper alternatives, and his thenboss, Colonel Griffis, also seemed opposed to the project at first, before reversing himself and approving the landfill. Suszkowski thought Judge Griesa had developed a bias against the project. Where Griesa saw possible collusion, Suszkowksi saw ineptness. Thus the judge interpreted the difference between the language in the preliminary Environmental Impact Statement and the final EIS as suppression of evidence, while Suszkowski thought it was simply that the preliminary EIS had been poorly written, confusing, and never should have been released. In the report's final draft, the language got sharpened and improved, not censored. In Suszkowksi's opinion, Westway was the last of the dinosaurs: it emerged from the age of big projects and stepped into the regulatory age. Its problem was not striped bass so much as bad timing. Craig Whitaker winced when I told him that. "No, we weren't the last of the dinosaurs, I like to think we were the first of the environmentally conscious projects." Lost in the denouement, he felt, had been the state's offer to invest as much as necessary to ease any impact Westway might have on the striped bass, by driving piles, dredging shallow basins, and sinking steel and concrete "fish houses," even making artificial habitats or piers for the fish to congregate in, at a cost of over $52 million. John Waldman acknowledged that he didn't think Westway would have necessarily harmed the striped bass, but he still didn't want the landfill. Where a good fish habitat exists, why risk destroying it? Mike Ludwig freely admitted to me that there were competent scientists on both sides. "It was an honest difference of opinion-we're still friends. But my side won and theirs lost." Given the fact that Manhattan had so often resorted to landfill in the „ л о п> OR THE BATTLE OF WESTWAY 105 OUTBOARD, and the fish kept adapting to its shorelines evolving profile, how can PoW j asked Ludwig, that the striped bass wouldn't have made an adjustment to Westway? "We can't know," he said. "Could they have adapted to the opposite shore?" "That's what Ed Koch said," Ludwig laughed, and reminded me how the thenmayor of New York had remarked, in his inimitably truculent manner' '"Let 'em move to Joisey.'" Ludwig countered, "Look, you don't want to anthropomorphize these critters, they're pretty dumb. But they don't know New Jersey. The Hudson around Lower Manhattan seems to have the proper mixture of saltwater and fresh water that they like." The scientific debate may continue for years; the legal one is ended. I am struck that the fate of Westway was decided in court by some picayune inconsistencies of presentation and selfprotective maneuvers typical of bureaucracy, some value judgments about what constitutes a significant adverse impact, which might have gone either way, and the judge's dislike of a witness.