November 4, 1986

BROADWAY from Columbus Circle through the West Side is filled with new condominiums and well-dressed shoppers come to sample the sparkling pleasures of gourmet delicatessens and designer boutiques. But seen through the eyes of a mental health worker, Broadway is a very different street. The swank and style recede, and a bent old woman in a filthy coat, fishing a slice of bread from the garbage can by Zabar's, and a man wrapped in a grimy blanket, huddled on the sidewalk by Lincoln Center talking earnestly with no one, come into focus. These are the clientele of a team of health workers who cruise the Upper West Side, searching out those whose confusion, delusions and despair have driven them to a life on the streets. This is the Broadway polite eyes avoid, an open psychiatric ward where those with severe mental illness find asylum of sorts in a bench or doorway. Broadway, with its busy traffic and mall-like traffic islands with benches, seems to be one of those public spaces that invites the mentally ill to set up housekeeping. And what is happening there is typical of many other streets and parks in cities throughout the country.

The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company said yesterday that it might sell Celeron, the oil and gas exploration company it purchased just three years ago, as part of a defensive restructuring. The sale of the Celeron subsidiary would deal a blow to the diversification effort undertaken in 1983 by Goodyear, the nation's largest tire manufacturer. But the divestiture, if it occurs, might also enable the concern, based in Akron, Ohio, to remain independent of an investment group put together by Sir James Goldsmith, the British-French investor. Last Friday, Sir James disclosed that his group owns 12.5 million shares of Goodyear, equal to 11.5 percent of the stock outstanding, and has considered taking over the company. Late last month Goodyear said it was studying the possibility of a restructuring. ''We expect to have the restructuring plan ready to announce to the public within the next two weeks,'' Robert E. Mercer, Goodyear's chairman and chief executive, said in a statement issued yesterday.

Pepsico Inc., which introduced American soft drinks to the Soviet Union on a wide scale 13 years ago, now wants to put its own brand of pizza on the Soviet menu as well. Pepsico is negotiating with Soviet officials to open as many as 100 Pizza Hut restaurants there, company officials said yesterday. If completed, the deal could make Pizza Hut the first foreign restaurant company to operate in the Soviet Union.

A power struggle in Iran is believed to be one element that cleared the way for release of an American hostage in Lebanon and improved chances for freeing the remaining captives, according to Arab diplomats here and reports in the Arab press. Arab diplomats said the arrest in Iran late last month of a man who headed Iran's efforts to spread its Islamic revolution had strengthened the position of officials in Teheran favoring improved relations with the United States. The diplomats said that these officials, in turn, put pressure on Iran-linked Shiite Moslem militants holding American hostages in Lebanon. One hostage, David P. Jacobsen, the director of the American University Hospital in Beirut, was freed on Sunday. [ Mr. Jacobsen was flown to a United States Army airfield in Wiesbaden, West Germany, where he said he was ''very, very happy'' but that he harbored ''really mixed feelings to be a free man again'' because of the Americans still captive in Lebanon. Page A10. ] Report of Arms Deal Denied There was also a report today in a Beirut publication that is usually well informed on Iranian affairs that said the United States had sent spare parts and ammunition for American-built fighter planes and tanks that Iran bought from the United States before the fall of Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi in 1979.

The principal agency that accredits the nation's hospitals said today that it would soon begin using surgical mortality and complication rates, along with other measures of medical outcome, as a central tool in accreditations. The change, to be gradually introduced over several years, starting next year, represents a fundamental shift in the way the nation's hospitals are evaluated. Medical experts say this could be the most important step yet in the broad national movement toward holding doctors and hospitals directly accountable for the quality of the care they provide. Now accreditation is based on whether hospitals are properly equipped and managed so they have the capacity to provide high-quality care.