by BARRY PETCHESKY, MURRAY WEISS and BILL SANDERSON
An early-morning blaze in a storefront of an Upper East Side luxury high-rise injured 19 people yesterday, including six firefighters.
An electrical short in a window display sparked the fire, which began at 5:10 a.m. in the State News stationery store on the Third Avenue side of the 35-story residential building at 200 East 72nd St.
The building's automatic alarms were being repaired, but a doorman triggered an alarm manually, alerting residents.
"I walked downstairs and the Fire Department was already here," said former Congressman Herman Badillo, who lives in the building. "It looked so bad. It's a miracle no one was killed."
"It looked like a movie - flames shooting out, smoke, melted metal. People were hanging out the window," said Paul Fusco, meat manager of Grace's Market, another shop in the building. Firefighters said they had to cut through the stationery store's security gates to get at the blaze.
The scope of the fire initially led investigators to suspect arson, but surveillance video confirmed the blaze was caused by an electrical short, FDNY sources said.
The blaze was declared under control at 6:30 a.m.
No city regulations require the modern building to have a fire alarm system. But if a building has an alarm, it has to work, the rules say.
Some building residents complained that they smelled smoke before the alarm went off. "There is no reason I should be woken up by the fire and not the alarm," said Archie Golding, 57, who lives on the fifth floor.
Building residents erred by fleeing, a Fire Department source said. Instead, they should have stayed in their apartments and awaited firefighters' evacuation instructions.
The building, called The Wellesley, is a rental owned by Carlyle Construction Corp. The company declined comment.
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