Automatic Elevator Blamed in Part For Crime Rise By ALICE HUGHES DAY AFTER sexy Silvana Man-gano, Italian film star of "Bitter Rice," got here to celebrate "Salute to Italian Film Week," her $16.- 000 ring was stolen from her New i one notet room, it's no news to us New Yorkers that robberies in our town are as common as alfalfa. Never a day or night passes without a bank holdup a moving-picture box-office haul, a palatial home rifled or a fat cash payroll snatched. Hotel robberies happen so often, it's like getting the weather report each morning. Reasons for these thefts are numerous: an inside job, a "cat" burglar, Harlem hoodlums, not enough police, etc. (and even press agents at times are suspect!). Now culDrit has been named as likely inciter to crime: the automatic elevator. OUR NEW YORK State Rent ad ministration is reported to favor a policy which frowns on automatic elevators for many reasons, two if which the Elevator Industries issociation challenges. Accidents and crime, according to the stale rent board, are less likely when house elevators are run by atten dants. "Taint so." say the Elevator industries. The incidence of acci- Ident is five times as great with i running the car than when lf-ODeratcd. And as to crime. the Elevator industries offer im portant proof that crime runs high- i de luxe hotels and apart ment houses where there are doormen, elevator pilots and watchmen galore. These gaudy, uniformed charac-trs are sometimes(l) ineffective ! watchmen. Any burglar in his ght mind would carefully avoid le men posted for duty in the ouse, so that they neither reduce rime nor deter it. NEW YORK State Rent adminis tration insists it has no policy against permitting old houses to convert from manual to self-driven. but it feels cosier when tenants are taken up and down by attendants. Tenants sav thev Drefer to drive their own, particularly if the cost of elevator men's salaries comes loff their rents. In new apartment bouses, automatic elevators are al- universally installed, because of the difficulty in finding capable 10 worn me elevators, it s e old aoartment houses that jlhe controversy rides up and down ss rent. Men-driven lifts mean MIRACLE ON A BUS Eavesdrop ping a conversation in French be iween two aarK-SKinnea young wo men from Haiti ,1 learned that thesi were two sisters recently come 1c New York, both in search of house work for emplovment. We all cot off at the same corner and, as they turned to ask me directions for reaching an address they held in hand. I chatted with them, found them well-spoken, with good written references from a former employer. They were finding it difficult to get work, because they knew so litUa English they couldn't make them- s understood by women when they were interviewed. "If we could find someone like you who speaks French " one of them said to me. Never have I been so happy that l had taken French for a major 'course in college. I had been call-ling agencies and answering advertisements for several weeks, searching for a full-time, live-in maid. It !is the live-in aspect that is next to impossible to find. Maids and housekeepers simply do not want to live in someone else's home. They prefer day work only. But in a household where there is a small child, a live-in worker is To my delight both these sisters wanted In live in. I engaged one and referred the other to a neighbor in the same plight as myself. Now we both have house- able 1 day should they