That's why I fell in love with the Albion Hotel the first time I saw it. Even though it was already closed, its spare lines and rusting Rainbow Room sign conjured up romantic images of Art Deco interiors, sparkling champagne, and witty Nick-and-Nora banter. And the rumor that many of the hotel's accruements -- including a staircase and the Rainbow Room murals -- came from the 1939 New York World's Fair made it all the more appealing.

That's also why when reality struck last week, in the form of a frantic phone call from a friend, I sprang into action. "I heard they're going to get a demolition permit to tear down the Albion Hotel," my friend told me. "Can you ask them to hold off for a week or two while I try to find a developer to save it?"

The request was immediately granted by Oceanfront Acquisitions, our redevelopment partners and the hotel's new owners, and I called Henry Vaccaro, the contractor hired to demolish several abandoned motels along the shore. Would Henry walk my engineer husband and me through the boarded-up hotel and nightclub?

According to historian Helen Pike and Asbury Park expert Ellis Gilliam, the Albion in its current incarnation opened around 1940, replacing an earlier Victorian structure that was destroyed in a fire.

During World War II, British sailors stationed at the Berkeley-Carteret and Monterey Hotels danced with patrons of the Rainbow Room, and Liberace once sat in with the house band, the Louise Duke Orchestra.

During that same era, the hotel also reportedly hosted the New York Yankees, who were forced to conduct their spring training in Asbury Park's high school stadium one year. (One version of the story places Yankees manager Casey Stengel in the top southeast hotel room, overlooking the beach at Second and Ocean Avenues. A less-repeated version maintains that it was the Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Robinson who came to town one spring.)

It was there, too, that a stranger approached bandleader Don Bader of Bradley Beach one day, and offered him a coveted position as bandleader of the world-famous Stork Club in New York.

By the 1960s, the club was moving from big band to rock'n'roll, and Joey Dee and the Starlighters performed the "Peppermint Twist" there in 1963.

All of that and more was whirling through my head when Henry led us into the hotel through a broken window last Saturday morning.

In some ways, it was exactly what I expected. In other ways, it was worse.

The windows are long gone, and years of accumulated moisture have caused tremendous damage. The surprisingly tiny rooms -- hardly big enough for a bed, dresser and chair -- are littered with powdered heaps of plaster, broken glass, and the skeletons of rusted metal furniture. Giant holes mar the ceilings and walls, and paint is peeling from every remaining surface. In some rooms, wild tangles of wire and pipe sprout from the ceiling.

Like the rooms, the elevators and hallways are too narrow to meet modern building and safety codes, and the dead-end hallways lack sufficient stairways for emergency exits. The dropped ceilings, meant to disguise air-conditioning ducts that were added in later decades, make for abnormally low ceilings, and the rusty beams -- exposed in the gaping ceiling holes -- are eaten away in spots.

Most of the plumbing is inaccessibly embedded in masonry walls, and a previous owner -- no doubt in a frustrated attempt to update the pipes -- ripped jagged channels along each wall and then hid the holes behind cheap plywood paneling.

On some floors, sunlight from the damaged roof is visible through the ceilings.

The bathrooms retain only the remnants of broken porcelain, and piles of trash -- old mattresses, rotting furniture, shattered glass, broken dishes, beer bottles, discarded magazines -- lie everywhere.

The once-grand Rainbow Room -- visible only with flashlights -- is a torn-up shell, with decaying panels of ‘70s style flocking on the walls and no sign of the fabled World's Fair murals.

Even for a packrat like me who spends hours roaming flea markets and outdoor antique shows, there was precious little to save, outside of an old railing, some rusting doorplates showing the room numbers, and the deteriorated outdoor signs that read Motel, Pool and Rainbow Room.

These and a few other rusted trophies will be saved for the city's historical archives. Almost everything else of value has been gone for a long time, either sold when the building was closed for redevelopment in the late ‘80s or stolen by treasure hunters.

Asbury Park is home to some significant treasures. However, I didn't need the engineering and construction knowledge of Henry or my husband to see that saving the Albion as it currently exists would take a major miracle.

As soon as we reached home, I dialed my friend. "There's something you need to see, and it's not good," I told him.

I have always thought that buildings like the Albion deserve memorial services, the same way that people do. Maybe then less of our heritage would reach the pathetic state I saw last Saturday.

That night I dreamed I was standing in the Albion Hotel. But it wasn't the Albion Hotel of twinkling lights and sparkling conversations, the one I had always wanted to visit. It was the Albion Hotel as it looks today, with lifeless windows, crumbling plaster and decimated, trash-filled rooms.

Sometimes this job involves way too much reality.