Taken Unawares

The perils that lurk in the big city are not all from muggers and mashers--as anyone knows who has listened to Manhattan's sirens incessantly ululating some emergency. In the past five weeks, for instance, New Yorkers and their guests have been taken unawares in some surprising ways.

Jack Badiner, 62, and his brother Julius, 60, operators of a knitting mill in Minneapolis, were walking on 43rd Street at Times Square when a motorcycle driven by Messenger Richard Zagami, 20, hit a hole in the street, bounced out of control and killed them both.

Some 200 people were eating lunch in Rosoff's Restaurant, also on 43rd Street just east of Times Square, when a Lincoln Continental sedan driven by Paul Bonadio, 59, shot out of a parking garage next door, caromed off the opposite curb and zoomed straight through Rosoff's window into the bar. Three people died in the shambles of glass and metal, and six others were injured.

Captain Robert Se'mer, 40, of Falls Church, Va., a Navy jet pilot, was walking with two companions along 47th Street near Third Avenue one evening when a high wind whipped a plank from a nearby building under construction. The plank crashed down on him and severed his right arm.

One day last week at a New York Telephone Co. building at 213th Street and Broadway, the 500 office workers, mostly women in the company's clerical departments, were beginning their lunch hour. Some of them had left the building to eat, but it was the day before payday, and many of them had economized by bringing their own lunches and taking them down to the cafeteria in the basement. In the boiler room next to the cafeteria, the watch engineer had just stepped out to cash a check. It was 12 107. With a reverberating, mind-stopping roar, one of the three steel boilers, 15 ft. long and 5 ft. across, exploded at one end. The escaping steam roared out through the aperture with the thrust of a rocket, drove the boiler through the wall into the cafeteria, on through the ceiling into the first-floor accounting office, then hurtled down into the cafeteria again and through the far wall into a file room. Stumbling through the choking, smoking chaos of shattered walls and furniture and bodies, survivors thought the city must have been hit by an atomic bomb. Many of them joined hands in human chains to guide each other outside. Photographs of the blasted mass of wreckage had an eerie unreality, suggesting the paintings of Lyonel Feininger. Fire Commissioner Edward Thompson later diagnosed the disaster as a probable failure of automatic devices designed to regulate the boiler's water level. The toll: 21 dead, 86 injured.

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