In 1929 the site was occupied by a lunch cart that provided hot food to workers in the area. It was succeeded by a prefabricated diner built by the Ward & Dickinson Dining Car Company. The current building was erected in 1941 and originally called Lil's Diner. It is a "Silk City Diner model, manufactured by the Paterson Vehicle Company in Paterson, New Jersey, one of the leading diner manufacturers of the time. The building is typical of the prefabricated diners that were common from the 1920s through the 1940s, built to resemble railroad cars and incorporating elements of Art Deco design. With its interior of cherry wood and porcelain enamelled steel and a geometrically tiled floor, it is one of the few pre-World War II diners in the United States in near-original condition. The interior was depicted by the photorealist artist Ralph Goings in his 1993 painting Miss Albany Diner. The diner changed hands over the years and was called successively Elaine's, the Firehouse Diner, and the Street Car Diner. Its current name was shared by a chain of several now defunct Miss Albany Diners owned by Stillman Pitts which were popular in Albany during the 1920s, one of which is explicitly mentioned in William Kennedy's novel Roscoe. When Kennedy's earlier novel Ironweed was made into a film in 1986, the diner was restored for use as one of the film's principal locations and given the name "Miss Albany Diner". At the time, a product placementbidding war ensued between Pepsi Cola and Coca-Cola over whose logo would be on the top of the diner. In 1988, after the filming of Ironweed ended, the diner was bought by Cliff Brown and his wife Jane. Cliff Brown, a former Albany resident and retired insurance salesman for New York Life, gave it the name used in the film, which it has retained to the present day. At Brown's initiative, the building was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places on November 6, 2000 and won a Preservation Merit Award in 2002 from the Historic Albany Foundation. In late 2009, Brown was 82 and wanted to retire. The diner was put up for sale, but as of 2010, it had still not been sold and continued to be run by Jane Brown. In February 2012, two years after Clifford Brown's death, the diner was finally bought by Matthew Baumgartner, the head of a property company that owns a nearby beer garden and several other restaurants in Albany. Baumgartner said that the diner's structure would be retained when he and his partners develop the site, but that there were no plans to run it as a diner. Jane Brown and her son retained the rights to the "Miss Albany Diner" name and its signature recipes. The Miss Albany served its last meal as a diner on February 10, 2012. The former diner is now the site of Tanpopo Ramen and Sake Bar.
The diner's restaurant
The Miss Albany Diner served breakfast, lunch and coffee on a "cash only" basis and was open Tuesday through Sunday until 2:15 pm, with both waiter and take-out service. Its signature dishes included:
Georgian Eggs
Mad Eggs
Calamity Jane
Mad Irish Toast.
The dishes were created by the owners' son Bill Brown, who had been a chef at the diner for many years. Mad Irish Toast was named one of the "Best Bites of 2002" by the Chicago Sun-Times.
