Where TV Once Turned for Its Tables

“ ‘Cheeseburger, cheeseburger’ — that was our diner stuff,” Lloyd Kabram said. He was referring, as you may have guessed, to the John Belushi routine on “Saturday Night Live.”

“The grill was ours,” Mr. Kabram said. “So was the counter and the stools. Whatever’s shot in New York, they usually come to us for something, whether it’s stainless-steel shelves or tables and chairs. We gave a tremendous amount to that movie ‘American Gangster.’ We gave some tables to ‘The Sopranos.’ ”

When Mr. Kabram says “gave,” he means “rented.” He rents equipment for television shows and movies, working out of a weary building on the Bowery that has an attendant-operated elevator so old you almost think Elisha Otis installed it himself.

M. Kabram & Sons, his company, has been around since 1908 and, like other businesses on the Bowery, deals in kitchen and restaurant supplies. It has been in this particular building, just south of Houston Street, since the 1920s. The “M” in M. Kabram was Mr. Kabram’s grandmother, Minnie. She helped her three sons — one of them being Lloyd Kabram’s father, Harry — get the business rolling.

Then along came television.

Early on, many hit shows were produced in New York. The Kabrams saw an opportunity.

“We started renting in the early ’50s,” Mr. Kabram said. “My father did ‘Sergeant Bilko.’ Anything in a New York studio with a kitchen, he did. He did ‘The Honeymooners’ in a couple of sketches. He had Ralph’s hot dog stand. I just saw it on a marathon recently. For ‘The Patty Duke Show,’ it was the malt shop. There were thousands of movies and television productions that he was involved in.”

You can see where this is going. Nothing lasts forever.

The Bowery, once defined by down-and-outers, has become one more chapter in a familiar New York story. Money moves in and flophouses go out, yielding to boutique hotels and fancy apartments.

For Mr. Kabram, who is 60 and went to work for his father 37 years ago, the neighborhood changes have meant higher property taxes and fewer parking places for customers and deliverers. The hassles began to mount. After weighing the pros and cons of sticking around, he sold the building.

And so an everything-must-go auction was held there the other day.

Thirty or 40 people picked through equipment stacked high and spread across five floors. Just about every inch of space was crammed with wooden bars, booths, cappuccino makers, ancient cash registers, grills, soda dispensers, cigarette machines, menu boards with removable letters, butcher-paper cutters, mounds of cups and dishes, malted-milk blenders and a few tabletop juke boxes flipped to Connie Francis and Nat King Cole tunes.

Some equipment in mint condition had been sold in advance to longtime Kabram customers who specialize in theater and movie props. Still, plenty of stuff was left.

Those who showed up for the auction were practical minded. This was not a traipse down memory lane for them. Besides, nothing on sale was truly iconic — nothing, say, on the order of Archie Bunker’s chair or the Kramdens’ icebox.

Josh Cohen and Blair Papagni looked for menu boards and milkshake mixers for Jimmy’s Diner, their restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Gilles Laferté, a Frenchman here on a fellowship, had stumbled onto the auction and thought he might find something to take home. Suri Bieler, the owner of a prop rental company in Manhattan, found a vintage Coca-Cola dispenser and an old peanut roaster that suited her needs.

Presiding over the sale was Eliot B. Millman, an auctioneer, who stood on a ladder and rattled off each item in a rapid, authoritative voice. Name it, Mr. Millman said, and over the last 40 years he has probably sold it. “Our motto is: We sell everything from cradles to coffins,” he said.

And what makes a good auctioneer? The ability, he said, “to make a balance of being fair to the seller and fair to the buyer.”

After three and a half hours, nearly the entire stock was sold (for an undisclosed sum). Buyers may need time to pick up their purchases. But soon enough, Mr. Kabram will hand the building’s keys to the new owner.

His son, Michael, 27, plans to continue selling new kitchen equipment online. But the prop rentals are done.

Of course, Lloyd Kabram said, it is hard not to get sentimental. But “I had the pleasure to work with a father and a son,” he said. “I think I’m extremely lucky to have that, to have worked with my two best friends.”

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com