The City: Death on the Glass Wall

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Up and down the sheer glass wall-to-wall windows of Manhattan's new skyscrapers, sealed eternally shut to keep conditioned air within, creep caged steel scaffolds, hung from cables and grooved to the buildings' ribs. Controlled by pushbutton, equipped with telephone, they are manned by a squad of window washers plying sponge and squeegee with a freedom and speed unknown to their brothers of the old-fashioned safety belt. But now scaffolds have been grounded.

At 5:30 one morning last week, Window Washer Frank Olsen, 49, was strapped in his belt and working on one of the old-fashioned windows of Radio City Music Hall when he heard "a whining sound like nothing I ever heard before." He looked over his shoulder at the 42-story Equitable Life Assurance Building on Sixth Avenue, completed last September. "I saw the scaffold falling," he said later. "The steel cables were draped all over it. It came down like a bullet and landed with a sound like an explosion."

Frank Olsen unhooked his belt, crawled inside, and hurried across the street. In the battered cage lay Nick Szczerba, 45, Fladgit Grover Zunk, 39, and Ulysses Johnson, 30—all dead. The fourth, Edmund Botelko, 37, was still moaning, but he died on the way to the hospital.