Reviewed by: Fighting Westway: Environmental Law, Citizen Activism, and the Regulatory War That Transformed New York City by William W. Buzbee Robert D. Lifset Fighting Westway: Environmental Law, Citizen Activism, and the Regulatory War That Transformed New York City. By William W. Buzbee. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014, 292 pages, $24.95 Cloth. In 1973 a truck fell through the West Side Highway, landing on the road below. The highway, running from 42nd Street to the Battery along the west side of Manhattan Island, was in serious disrepair rendering it unusable. In response, state and city planners devised a clever and creative solution: extend the western boundary of Manhattan into the Hudson, rebuild the highway under this landfill and above it place a large park. By adding this new highway to the federal interstate highway map, ninety percent of the costs of the project would be paid for by the federal government. Westway would provide a large infusion of federal money (estimated initial costs of $1–2 billion for a 4.2-mile highway, making it the most expensive highway in the nation) to solve a transportation problem. But the larger purpose of the project was to spark the redevelopment of New York City's Lower West Side. The landfill and buried highway would create new land the city could sell or lease at a time of fiscal crisis. Ironically, the decision to bury the road under landfill in the Hudson River emerged from the lessons learned by decades of community activism opposing the destruction and dislocation caused by Robert Moses' many highway projects. The road would displace no one and have only a slight impact on nearby neighborhoods. Between 1970 and 1985 every New York City mayor and New York State governor, both US Senators, the city unions and banking establishment supported Westway. Westway was never built. Now, we have in William Buzbee's new book a full understanding of precisely how and why this project was stopped. In the process it clears away what Buzbee describes as the myths surrounding Westway's defeat. Buzbee guides the reader through the legal strategy, court cases, regulatory decisions, briefs, and judicial decisions that marked the many twists and turns of the Westway fight. By examining all the relevant primary sources while conducting an impressive number of oral history interviews, Buzbee has produced an impressive history. [End Page 130] Buzbee advances three primary factors for Westway's demise. First, Westway's opponents benefitted from the leadership provided by a consistent and savvy group, none of whom was more important than Marcy Benstock of the Clean Air Alliance. In contrast, Westway's supporters, while consisting of much of the city and state's economic and political elite, often had no single individual planning strategy to push the project forward. Second, a change in federal law allowed for trading in highway money for mass transit funding expanding the ranks of Westway opponents to include advocates for mass transportation. It also helps explain why many city, state, and federal legislators from New York were against Westway. What sense did it make to spend billions (estimates of the cost grew and the final price tag may have been in the tens of billions) on a highway while the subway was falling apart? Westway could never escape the impression that it was largely designed as a means to use federal money to disproportionately benefit the city's powerful real estate and financial interests. Finally, Westway ran into the high legal barrier created by section 404 of the Clean Water Act (1972). Section 404 required the Army Corps of Engineers (the federal authority responsible for granting permits to dump fill into navigable waters) to deny a permit if a proposed project does not need to dump fill material into those waters; or if that fill were to cause significant degradation of an aquatic resource, especially harm to important fishery breeding grounds and habitat; or if an action's impacts were uncertain. Westway supporters found a reliably compliant partner in the Army Corps of Engineers, which twice issued permits only to see them overturned by a federal judge whose injunctions were upheld by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals...