With over 600 lots up for bid, yesterday’s auction at the Four Seasons began at 10a.m. and went well into the evening. It started off with a bang. The first item, one of the restaurant’s bronze signs with its iconic logo of trees in winter, spring, summer, and fall, sold for $96,000—nearly 20 times the modest estimate of $5,000 – $7,000. Proceeds from that sale went to the Canadian Centre for Architecture, founded by Phyllis Lambert, who was integral in hiring Mies van der Rohe to design the Seagram Building, and Philip Johnson the Four Seasons within its lower levels. She had also been very vocal in her wish to keep the interiors—at the time in 1959, the most expensive restaurant ever built at $4.5 million and for decades home to the power lunch—intact.

Everything from furniture to flatware was sold off, some at staggering prices—$4,000 for a set of twelve martini glasses, $6,000 for the same number of ashtrays. Though the auction moved along slowly, with drawn-out bidding for almost every item—many in duplicate and triplicate—there were moments of levity. At one point, Julian Niccolini, co-managing partner with Alex von Bidder, wearing a hard hat and always with a flair for theatrics, brought around cotton candy for the crowd —many regulars of the establishment there — to bring home a piece of history (The restaurant’s cotton candy machine sold for $6,000).