Neither President Donald Trump nor his family was in the building, a Fifth Avenue skyscraper that is the calling card of his real estate business.

The commissioner said firefighters went with the Secret Service to inspect the president's residence.

More than 200 firefighters responded to the fire, the cause of which was unknown, the commissioner said.

Trump, who was in Washington at the time, said on Twitter that the tower's construction helped confine the fire.

The commissioner said the upper floors that are home to residences do not have fire sprinklers. "It's a well-built building," he said. "The building sure stood up quite well."

While the building is subject around the clock to extra security by law enforcement, extra fire protection happens only when the president is there, Nigro said.

Fire sprinklers were not required in New York City high-rises when Trump Tower was completed in 1983. Subsequent updates to the building code required commercial skyscrapers to install the sprinklers retroactively, but owners of older residential high-rises are not required to install sprinklers unless the building undergoes major renovations.

Some fire-safety advocates pushed for a requirement that older apartment buildings be retrofitted with sprinklers when New York City passed a law requiring them in new residential highrises in 1999, but officials in the administration of then-mayor Rudy Giuliani said that would be too expensive.

Nigro noted that no member of the Trump family was in the 664-foot tower Saturday.

Trump's family has an apartment on the top floors of the 58-story building, but he has spent little time in New York since taking office. The headquarters of the Trump Organization is on the 26th floor.

Authorities restricted passers-by from the area directly in front of the tower, keeping them out of the street and on the sidewalk on the opposite side of Fifth Avenue.

Lalitha Masson, a 76-year-old resident, called it "a very, very terrifying experience."

"When I saw the television, I thought we were finished," said Masson, who lives on the 36th floor with her husband, Narinder, who is 79 and has Parkinson's disease. "I called my oldest son and said goodbye to him because the way it looked everything was falling out of the window, and it reminded me of 9/11."

She said that she did not get any announcement about leaving and that when she called the front desk no one answered.

Dennis Shields, who said he lived on the 42nd floor, described the scene.

"You could smell the smoke, and you could hear things falling like through the vents," he said. "It just smelled like sulfur."

He said there were no orders to evacuate but he received a text message from Trump's lawyer, Michael D. Cohen.

Shields, who said he grew up with Cohen, continued: "He said, 'Are you in the building?' I said, 'Yes.' He said, 'You better get out ASAP.' That's how I knew to get out, otherwise I'd still be in there."

In January, a small electrical fire broke out near the top of the building. Officials at the time indicated it was in the building's heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system. A firefighter was hurt by falling debris, and two civilians were injured.

AP, New York Times