At American Home, it's one last day at the office.

Here is one of the largest mortgage companies going down the tubes.. Have a great weekend!

MELVILLE, New York (Reuters) - In some respects it was a normal summer Friday in this Long Island hamlet roughly 50 miles east of Wall Street. The weather was hot, a bit steamy. The weekend approached, and employees of American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. awaited their paychecks.

What was different was that the checks would be their last.

One day earlier the mortgage lender said it would fire nearly 7,000 employees, an exclamation mark to one of the biggest and fastest corporate collapses in the U.S. housing downturn. Friday would be the last day.

"This is my first stint in the mortgage field and probably my last," said Nick Vasilakis, 31, as he entered company's headquarters in shorts, a T-shirt and a baseball cap. He said he had worked at American Home for two months.

In a statement Thursday night, American Home confirmed it would cease most operations. It will slash its nationwide employee base to about 750 workers from the 7,409 it reported at the end of last year.

The collapse is widely expected to lead to a bankruptcy filing over the next few days. It is one of the most dramatic signs that the contraction in subprime lending industry, which make loans to people with weak credit records, has spread.

American Home, founded in 1987, by its own reckoning had become the 10th largest U.S. retail mortgage lender, originating $59 billion in loans last year.

"It was a meteoric rise and fall in 3-1/2 years," a company financial analyst over that period said in an interview outside the headquarters. He did not want to be identified for fear of jeopardizing his job hunt.

American Home lent mainly to people with good credit histories, yet offered loans with terms that were too easy. Continued..