I met my faux ex-husband at the St. Paul Hotel. "Faux" because that was the kind of marriage one had in the '50s: I thought I was married, he did not. I was 27, and my mother had told me that I would soon be an old maid and should start industriously seeking a groom. So in a last-ditch effort at connubial bliss, I joined a Catholic lonely-hearts correspondence club. I soon had a flock of misfits flying in each weekend to stay at the St. Paul Hotel-where, after a socially acceptable delay, I joined them in the lounge area for a cocktail and to assess their romantic potential.

This became a weekly routine-one suitor a week was my limit. I would curl my hair and put on my silk taffeta dress and appear in that lounge every Friday night after the airport van had discharged its passengers. The potential suitors and I eyed each other and tried to sell each other on our mutual merits over Pink Ladies served on small paper coasters that said "St. Paul Saints."

These fly-ins became boring after awhile. The farm boy from Iowa with a ridge on his forehead where his straw hat had been, the executive from Connecticut who was 4-foot-8, the football coach (I hate sports). So when Ed showed up with a Ph.D. in psychology from Loyola University and an acceptable height of 5-foot-10, I asked him to marry me.

He said he had prayed all his life to the Blessed Virgin for a good wife, and now his prayers were answered, right there at the St. Paul Hotel. He grabbed me and kissed me across the table, his tie and my scarf dipping into the melting Pink Ladies beneath our embrace. It sealed our commitment and our doom.

When St. Paul was settled in the mid-1800s, the streets in the city were crooked. The builders accepted this situation with aplomb and built crooked buildings to match the crooked streets. Many buildings downtown were triangles, some were shapes one could not identify. There were small strips of land left over-much like the ends of note-paper or wallpaper-on which long, thin restaurants and short, curved dentist offices were erected. One such strip was on St. Peter Street, where lots of other streets crashed into it without permission. Haphazard, just like love.

The St. Paul Hotel was given an extremely narrow, triangular piece of land-more crooked than the jail's or the courthouse's or the fish factory's. It came to its apex at the front door, which meant that the front steps and lobby were also crooked. The rooms in that pinched angle must have had triangular beds.

In the '50s, something new came to town: the smorgasbord or buffet. The St. Paul Hotel was the first one to embrace this dining concept and immediately remodeled its dank basement into a banquet room. Even with low lighting, linen table cloths, and 150 kinds of desserts, it felt like you were eating in a basement.

The great attraction to the St. Paul smorgasbord was the price. Two dollars for all the ham and turkey and chicken and duck and ribs you could eat. This was new and enticing, and bulky men lined up for blocks. All those men, and here I was flying them in from elsewhere. After 11 a.m. Mass at Holy Spirit church on Sunday, my parents and I would get on the Randolph-Hazel Park streetcar and join the others in the preprandial wait for sustenance. Inside, the tables were laden with food, like a scene from a Roman orgy, and lit from the bottom for maximum theatrical effect.

Soon other smorgasbords opened, and the St. Paul Hotel's business dwindled. It fell on fallow times. The nearby park drew restless transients.

The St. Paul Hotel did not die. In fact, it had an enormous face lift. Today there is an awning and a red carpet and a circular drive and a snappy young valet in a maroon uniform with a gold braid to drive your chariot away to an indoor parking ramp. There are flowers and shrubs nurtured by a horticulturist. And the room rates have jumped from the meager 1950s rates my suitors paid to a 1990s price of more than $200.

But now we're only a month or so away from spring in Minnesota-as good an excuse as any to celebrate at the St. Paul Hotel. I am with a dear friend, one without a Ph.D. in psychology or a red mark where once rested a straw hat. We have a room on the fifth floor overlooking the tiny white lights of the park, Jim Hill's St. Paul library, and the Ordway Music Theatre. We have books to read, a concert to attend, and a walk to take. And then a lovely five-course Valentine's Day dinner that will surely cost more than $2.

But the best part is that I am not interviewing potential suitors. I don't have to drink Pink Ladies in my taffeta dress. And I won't make the mistake tonight of asking anyone to marry me. I feel like I've come home to rest. MM

Judy Delton is a freelance writer based in St. Paul.