Crane

A crane lies in debris it created when it fell onto a house in the 2500 block of Dickinson Street yesterday. Luvinia Davenport, reading Scripture in the upstairs front bedroom, narrowly escaped injury. The crane also hit a power line, cutting electricity to about 2,000 homes in the area for several hours. The Hawthorne Co., which was using the crane to demolish the old Pullman Building, said it would fix the house.

Only the trunk of the landmark 230-foot-tall hammerhead crane remains at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. The 300-foot horizontal beam at the top is gone. Demolition, as part of improvements to Pier 4, continues. The crane was built by hand between 1915 and 1917.

It's the tallest free-standing crane ever used on a Philadelphia construction project, according to contractor Anthony J. Samango Jr., working in the city's Franklintown section. Samango, president of Carson Concrete, of Conshohocken, said the 280-foot crane is being used to build a 26-story, 225- unit apartment building at 20th and Buttonwood streets.

Conrail has found its own way to thank outgoing chairman L. Stanley Crane and retired president Stuart M. Reed for a job well done. The board of directors for the Philadelphia-based railroad has decided to give Crane, 72, chairman and chief executive for seven years, a special pension that boosts his retirement pay to $225,000 a year. Under the standard company pension plan, he would have been entitled to about $36,000 a year after his retirement this year. And the board decided to give Reed, 62, who retired in December after nine years, a $1.2 million, lump-sum retirement payment in January, in addition to agreeing to continue paying his life, medical and dental benefits through July 1990.

On July 9, a 28-year-old employee of a bungee-jumping business died when a jumping platform fell from a construction crane in Auburn, Mich. It was the second time since the craze began in the United States in 1987 that death had struck bungee jumping - which is daredevil leaping from a height, tethered to safety only by an elastic cord. The death led the state of Florida to impose a temporary ban on all commercial bungee jumping. It also spotlighted an often unregulated business that has mushroomed in the last year across the nation, reaching the New Jersey Shore and Philadelphia this summer.

Borough Council President Mitch Crane thinks it's time to place this town's economic future in the hands of someone who knows what to do. With the downtown business district pockmarked with vacant storefronts and a multitude of shopping malls only minutes away, the time has come for West Chester to hire someone to promote its downtown shopping district full time, Crane said. At Wednesday night's Borough Council meeting, he proposed creating a new job for a "commerce director," who would be charged with luring both new businesses and new customers onto West Chester's scenic streets.

Conrail is "cautiously optimistic" that Congress won't act this year on legislation to limit some of the freedom that railroads have to set freight- hauling rates, chairman L. Stanley Crane told stockholders yesterday. However, "you never can tell for sure what Congress is going to do," Crane said at Conrail's first regular stockholders' meeting since the Philadelphia railroad became a private-sector company in March 1987. Legislation to amend the Staggers Rail Act, which deregulated the rail industry, and place greater control on some of the rates that railroads charge to haul freight passed the transportation subcommittee of the House Commerce Committee last year.

A bridge inspector in a cherry picker hangs off the Walk Whitman Bridge yesterday after the crane holding his bucket tipped over. The man, an employee of A.G. Lichtenstein engineers, dangled for 15 minutes before being brought to safety, according to Delaware River Port Authority spokesman Joe Diemer. The inspector's bucket was suspended from a crane parked in a closed, eastbound lane of the bridge. "Apparently the truck tipped at least a little bit," Diemer said. He said he didn't know how much danger the man was in or who rescued him.