It took less time than people used to spend eating dinner there.

Thursday afternoon, auctioneers led a small group of bidders through the old Casa D’Angelo restaurant at 3402 Fairfield Ave., and within 90 minutes everything that wasn’t nailed down was gone.

The restaurant, which opened in 1979 and was the oldest in the Casa chain, was one of the most popular restaurants in Fort Wayne, if not the most popular. Patrons would have a glass of wine at the bar or in the lobby while they waited for a table.

But times changed. Oh, the food and service were as good as ever, but the demographics of the neighborhood changed.

Lutheran Hospital and Taylor University, both big sources of customers, closed. The grocery down the street closed. The institutions that caused customers to flow past Casa’s disappeared and customers dwindled.

The eatery closed in February 2010, and the building has been on the market since then. A lot of people looked at the property, which includes a turn-of-the-20th-century grocery building and former garage, but the economy and banks reluctant to lend money meant it didn’t sell, said Jim Casaburo, a member of the family that runs the popular local restaurants.

So Thursday, it all went on the block, the buildings, the parking lots, the pots and pans and coolers and stoves and chairs and tables and even the old books on the shelves in the main dining room.

Practically no one was interested in the real estate, though. Finally, one person offered a lowball bid of $10,000 for all the buildings and parking lots. After a brief discussion in private, the bid was rejected.

A $5,000 bid for the three-way liquor license was also rejected, so the sale moved on to what was left in the building.

The steel patio chairs and tables in the lobby went for $45 for a set of one table and four chairs. Tables stacked high with aluminum and stainless steel pans went for a few dollars. The auctioneer tried to sell a grouping of 11 chairs one at a time, but bidders wanted to bid on the entire lot. The group of 11 chairs went for $10, about 90 cents each.Coolers, gas stoves, ovens and heavy stainless-steel kitchen tables went for bargain prices.

It was clear that most bidders weren’t restaurateurs looking for good prices on equipment, though one young couple who owned a pizzeria were in the market for tables and chairs so they could expand their little operation. They bought several heavy dining sets for about $50 each.

The rest of the bidders, many wearing jeans and dirty sweatshirts, were looking for scrap metal.

“They’ll buy something for $10 today and sell it for scrap for $30 tomorrow,” said Tom Parisi, director of operations for Casa.

But family members, who joked that they and the auctioneers outnumbered the bidders, seemed untroubled. The other Casa restaurants had already gone through the place and taken what they wanted. The items that remained were leftovers.

Upstairs, in what was the dining room of a restaurant that preceded Casas, were two huge built-in coolers. They were installed during the heyday of the restaurant, when the coolers downstairs weren’t big enough. Later they were used to hold stacks of wheels of Parmesan cheese imported from Italy. It would be grated daily by a motorized grater just a few feet away in an upstairs kitchen.

Two weeks ago, Parisi said, that dining room was filled with 30 years’ worth of accounting work. Now it’s all in storage somewhere else, and what was left in the room went to bidders, most of it for a pittance.

And with that, it all ended. The bidders quickly left with instructions to remove what they had bought by noon Friday.

But the building remains on the market, waiting for better times. The company had been asking $175,000 for the property, which includes the parking lots, but the price has since been reduced.