Miss Albany Diner, a Landmark, Is Closing ALBANY - The Mad Irish Toast sold out in three hours. Akum Norder was fortunate enough to get the last plate of it on Wednesday: French toast made with Texas-style bread, pecan cream filling and Irish whiskey sauce. After she had finished, she scraped the residue off the dish with her finger and licked it, mourning her farewell to the Miss Albany Diner. The Miss Albany, a streamlined metal diner fabricated to look like a railroad car, has been a fixture of north Albany since Herbert H. Lehman was governor, but it is closing on Friday. "It's an incredible loss," Ms. Norder, 39, said while staring at the remains of her meal. There's nothing like this. For the last several days, since the owner unexpectedly announced last week that it was closing, the line for a seat spilled onto the sidewalk, in front of its custard-and-raspberry-colored exterior. The patrons wore suits, jeans, hoodies and work boots. They crammed into the cherry wood booths, careful not to burn their legs on the radiator below, or onto chrome counter stools, admiring the arched ceiling, the porcelain-coated steel walls, the hand-laid floor and wall tiles, and the punchy signs ("The benches are to sit on. The floor is for feet"). Where else can you go back in time like this? Frank Woods asked, as he waited for a table. In general, restaurants in downtown Albany cater to lobbyists with big checkbooks or state workers on their lunch breaks, but the Miss Albany Diner is a throwback, a place known as much for its quirks - the waiters used to serve Sunday brunch in tuxedos - as for its creative menu and homey feel. And the restaurant is on the National Register of Historic Places, cited as "a distinctive example of mid-20th-century American roadside architecture." "It's been an anchor in that area for many, many, many years," said Mayor Gerald D. Jennings of Albany, who has frequented the diner since he was a child. Miss Albany's owner, Jane Brown, 77, relishes stories about the early days of the diner, when the first owner, Lil McCauliff, was said to have dragged misbehaving customers out by the collars. But Ms. Brown herself is a character. She has done voice-overs for commercials, acted in independent movies and said she once stopped a fight between patrons with a stern stare and two words: "Sit down." Ms. Brown said she and her husband, Clifford, had been trying to sell the diner for several years because they were getting old and wanted to retire. Then, two years ago, Mr. Brown died. Ms. Brown finally found a buyer in Matthew Baumgartner, a prominent local restaurateur who owns a neighboring beer garden. Mr. Baumgartner said he and his business partners would retain the structure but would probably open a restaurant inside. The diner's days, it appears, are over. The lot Miss Albany occupies, about a mile and a half from the Capitol, was the site of a lunch cart that opened in 1929, serving workers in what was a commercial and industrial area. The railroad-car-style diner was erected in 1941 and named Lil's Diner, after Ms. McCauliff. In the mid-1980s, it was restored for use in "Ironweed," a film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep that was based on the novel by William Kennedy; the filmmakers called it the Miss Albany Diner, taking the name from a onetime chain of local diners. The Browns bought the diner in 1988; Mr. Brown was responsible for much of the food and décor. A pegboard on one wall lists how far away various cities are, from Troy (8 minutes) to Tokyo (15 hours), because Mr. Brown saw Albany as a central meeting point. And then there are the three rectangular pieces of Styrofoam, each with a slightly different hue, hanging from the ceiling; Mr. Brown wanted patrons to point to one of the three to indicate the degree of doneness they wanted for their French fries. The Mad Eggs are a version of eggs Benedict, topped with a curry sauce instead of hollandaise, because Mr. Brown had high cholesterol. And Cliff's Ugly Eggs were born on the day Mr. Brown asked the cook to whip him up eggs with anchovies and mushrooms; when the dish arrived, the man next to him said it looked ugly. The diner's relatively remote location inspired the Browns" son, Bill, a chef, when he created the menu. "I kind of figured since nobody really knew about the diner at the time, they weren't coming down here for bacon and eggs," he said. So I thought this gave us license to do anything we could think up. Bill Brown recalled seeing Stan Lundine, lieutenant governor during the administration of Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, sitting on a stool surrounded by an art student, a janitor, the president of a local company and a truck driver. "They all sat there trading jokes," he said. It didn't matter who anybody was, as long as you had a good joke to tell. That's really the spirit of the diner, to sit and share, take a break from life.