PUBLIC LIVES; Persistence (and Striped Bass!) Wins a Park

THE walls of Albert K. Butzel's dining room are an especially handsome brick red. He accepts a compliment. ''The entire room was painted seven times until the color was right,'' says Mr. Butzel, a soft-spoken man with spectacles who makes Woody Allen appear robust. ''I know. I watched them doing it.''

A wry smile flits across his face, glints in his glasses, and is gone.

Oh, Goliath! Beware frail-looking people who will watch paint dry. At day's end, who do you think will be left standing? Introducing Al Butzel, an odd duck and a rare bird, a shy, occasionally awkward Harvard College-Harvard Law man who hates confrontation and who can't stand litigation. He nevertheless spent 15 years litigating one environmental case (he won), seven on another (he won), and four (so far) lobbying for Hudson River Park, which he sees as a bookend to his defeat of the Westway highway project.

Last week, the federal government approved limited construction in the river, removing what was probably the last obstacle to the waterfront renovation and five-mile park, which has been debated since 1972.

''My ego is gratified,'' says Mr. Butzel, 61, a graduate of 40 years of therapy and three unfinished novels.

Mr. Butzel is chairman of the Hudson River Park Alliance, a coalition of 35 environmental and community groups supporting the project. He nagged, cajoled and exhorted Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to pony up the political and budgetary capital to make the park happen. He gnawed at Albany legislators to pass a bill he helped write to protect the river's ecosystem.

Throughout that siege, he was often seen as annoying, arrogant and sharp tongued. But he and the powerful coalition he assembled astutely appealed to higher-minded political interests (A park! People! Water! Striped bass!) as well as to lower ones (You want to tank a park? You want another politician to get credit?). But most important, the wispy Mr. Butzel just would not go away.

Although he is considered a brilliant tactician and a giant in local environmental law, having won precedent-setting decisions blocking Westway and a Con Ed power plant at Storm King Mountain, as well as having a hand in protecting Sterling Forest and tracts of the Hudson River Valley, Mr. Butzel is not exactly a standard-issue tree-hugger.

He does not hike. Nor recycle fastidiously. Doesn't fish. Or get exercised about air pollution or water pollution. He simply loves pristine land.

A solo operator, he works out of his Park Avenue apartment, in some measure thanks to family money, surrounded by antiques and paintings that reflect quiet good taste. Now a grandfather, he has been married for 38 years to Brenda, a clinical social worker. Hardly a boat rocker.

''But I just went to a homeopath for the first time,'' allows Mr. Butzel. ''I think I'm too uptight, so I'm trying to loosen up.''

YET within the worlds in which he travels, Mr. Butzel is an original and a risk taker.

He's from Birmingham, Mich., a lawyer's son. As the middle child, ''I felt obligated to be a lawyer, but it was nothing I pined to do,'' he says, settling into a kitchen chair. ''It scared me -- it's so confrontational.''

As a reluctant baby lawyer at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, Mr. Butzel began working on the Storm King dispute. With the first ruling in 1965, the case was among the earliest to grant citizens standing to sue for environmental well-being.

When Mr. Butzel did the unexpected -- leaving Paul, Weiss to form the boutique environmental firm Berle, Butzel & Kass -- he stuck with Storm King through a dozen decisions, until it ended in 1980.

Among his most prominent battles was his representation of Marcy Benstock of the Clean Air Campaign, fighting Westway (he and she have since parted ways over the park). But in 1984, at the height of his acclaim, he quit to write fiction.

It was a gamble that he lost. His third half-novel, a 400-page work patterned after Joyce's ''Ulysses,'' was his undoing. After mustering the nerve to send the manuscript to one agent, he found rejection unbearable. ''He said it was probably good writing,'' Mr. Butzel recalls, flinching, ''but not the kind he published. That was so painful. I wanted it to have universal appeal.''

He skid into writer's block. Months went by. To fill time, he studied drawing. Then math. French. Felt isolated, ashamed, unproductive, depressed, lost.

Then he tried real estate. Fledgling success -- housing for battered women -- and flops. In 1996, a designer of plans for the Hudson park, which had languished, called. Mr. Butzel, who thought that defeating Westway did not fix the rotting waterfront, returned to action.

This time he was no longer a lawyer but a lobbyist, trying to build consensus rather than to win through confrontation. As he threw thousands of mostly unpaid hours into his recast role, he realized the rewards this time would be different.

He wasn't just blocking a power plant or a highway; the man who couldn't finish a novel was helping create a park and a waterfront that he and many environmentalists believe protects and celebrates the river.

''I refuse to accept that my accomplishments are transient,'' says Mr. Butzel, that wry smile flitting across his face again. ''That's why I like to get parks done.''