Drexel Prepares for Its Wall Street Garage Sale : Bankruptcy: From trading desks to typewriters, more than 1,500 lots of furnishings from the now-defunct securities firm must go.

Drexel Burnham Lambert, the investment house built on junk bonds and destroyed by charges of fraud, put the furniture up for sale Sunday.

Thousands lined up for more than an hour to walk through Drexel’s headquarters at 60 Broad St., just four doors away from the New York Stock Exchange.

On view were more than 1,500 lots of merchandise to be auctioned Wednesday in New York’s biggest convention hall.

The items ranged from an 83-foot trading desk designed to seat 37 people (Lot 1416) to a blown-up photograph of I. W. (Tubby) Burnham II, founder and honorary chairman of Drexel Burnham Lambert Group (Lot 2452).

The auction is one of the final ignominious steps in Drexel’s collapse. It became one of the biggest and most powerful investment houses on Wall Street in the freewheeling 1980s, mostly through the innovative use of high-yield junk bonds.

Drexel’s star, Michael Milken, turned the bonds--traditionally shunned by the blue bloods of Wall Street--into a multibillion-dollar market.

But Milken and Drexel ran into the government’s massive investigation of illegal insider trading on Wall Street. The firm’s legal problems eventually led to a cash crisis. It filed for bankruptcy protection in February and began winding up its operations.

Some who stood in line an hour at Drexel’s headquarters were there just to see what it looked like. “It’s a sad day,” one said.

But most appeared to be serious bidders. They included furniture and restaurant supply wholesalers and small entrepreneurs looking to pick up a computer for their businesses.

Much of the merchandise for sale was office furniture. It ranged from austere gray metal or wood desks to only slightly more elegant trappings for top executives. Drexel was never a firm for opulence and its offices reflected that.

Personal papers had long since been cleared out, but the offices still bore marks of their inhabitants. One desk drawer contained packages of Pepto-Bismol tablets and throat lozenges. At the main reception desk was a family snapshot and an envelope containing the final week’s time cards.

Much of the attention was focused on the ninth floor, where equities and bond traders had labored for long hours to make money through rapid-fire dealings in stocks, bonds and foreign currencies.

Stacked above the trading stations were hundreds of computer terminals from IBM, Sun Microsystems, Memorex and others. Above it all flashed an electronic billboard: “Welcome to Drexel Burnham Lambert’s Block Trading Desk.”

Handling the auction is Ross-Dove Co., which promises that it will get through the 1,500 lots in one day.