Second Greatest

"I looked up." said one witness, "and I saw what looked like a burning log hurtling through the air. It landed on the roof of the building and bounded to the street. It was a man."

Other New Yorkers who happened to be near the East River at 135th St. one morning last week told of seeing the 44-year-old excursion steamer Observation push off from her pier with the usual cargo of workmen going to their jobs on a new-penitentiary on an island in the river. Next instant, deafened by a water-boiling explosion, they saw a great cloud of smoke spouting a horrid spray of bodies, fragments of wood and metal, fragments of bodies over a 200-yard area of land and water.

Between 130 and 200 men were on the boat. After a day and night of body- gathering, police had counted 37 dead, 63 injured. Final casualty count: 63 dead, 63 injured.

Suspected cause of the explosion was a sudden giving-away of the boat's 26-year-old boilers, though they had passed official inspection two months before. But also two months ago a local ironworkers' union had complained that the boat was undermanned, overcrowded, unseaworthy. Four separate investigations were launched, while divers grappled for the sunken boilers.

The Observation's victims were brought to the ferry house at 134th St. In that same place 28 years ago were laid out the bodies of 1,021 children, teachers, parents who. bound on a Sunday-school picnic, were burned or drowned when the excursion steamer General Slocum caught fire a few hundred feet away. Next to the General Slocum, the Observation took its place as the greatest marine disaster around New York.

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