Timing Saves Survivors as Crane Wreaks Neighborhood Havoc

NEW YORK (AP)  -- Timing was everything for Jean Squeri and her husband, Kerry Walker, who left their top-floor apartment in an East Side town house just minutes before a towering construction crane toppled on it, reducing the 19th century building to rubble.

Timing also was everything for Rabbi Shmuly Metzger, who had to flee with his wife and children after debris rained down from the ceiling of the apartment where he holds regular sabbath services on Saturday afternoons.

And it was everything for John Gallego and Juan Perez, who were in the front area of Fubar, a popular saloon on the ground floor in the same building where Squeri and Walker live. Both men wound up at Bellevue Hospital with injuries as the falling behemoth reduced the bar to flinders.

As of late Sunday, four people were known dead, three missing and 24 injured in the collapse of the towering crane that stood about 200 feet.

While the disaster came suddenly and without warning, many people in the midtown Turtle Bay neighborhood, a few blocks from the United Nations, had feared it was an accident waiting to happen. Among them was Walker, a 69-year-old retired ironworker.

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According to stepson John Viscardi, Walker had complained for weeks that the crane as erected appeared dangerously unstable and "shoddy."

"He knows all about cranes and said this one had no braces, everything was too minimal," Viscardi said. "He told one friend on the phone that 'if you don't hear from me, it's because the crane fell on my house.'"

Squeri, 74, who works in an administrative office at Manhattan's Hunter College, was on her way to a nearby drugstore when she heard the noise and looked back to see that actually happening. The four-story building, owned by her family for 80 years, disappeared in a cloud of yellow smoke and dust.

Squeri was seen on television, sobbing about her narrow escape. Viscardi, an actor and writer, said his mother has continued to have bouts of crying over the incident.

"She was just devastated. She was born and raised in that building." he said. "She has been clearly traumatized."

Rabbi Metzger, according to a friend, moved his family to a West Side hotel after the crane mishap. Phone messages left for him there were not immediately returned.

Fubar owner John LeGreco said the saloon opens at 4 p.m. on Saturdays and only Perez, the porter, and Gallego, a regular customer who operates an Internet clothing business from his apartment a floor above, were there when the crane hit about 2:30 p.m.

If they had been in the rear of the bar they probably wouldn't have survived, LaGreco said. Both remained in serious condition at Bellevue Hospital, a spokesman said.

A woman friend of Gallego from Florida was still missing late Sunday as firefighters and other workers dug into the rubble.

LeGreco said it was timing, two days before St. Patrick's Day, that forestalled a greater tragedy. The East Side's Irish bars are jammed with customers on that day. "We're not an Irish bar but we get plenty of business," he said, "The bartenders make enough in one night to pay their rent."

While Squeri and Walker were able to stay at Viscardi's west side apartment, they were mourning the possible loss of their two cats, he said.

"The cats, Mr. Gloves and Googs, slept on Kerry's chest," Viscardi said.

As he spoke to AP in a phone interview, word came that one of the cats might have been found alive.