Allan Spear at the New Riverside Cafe, Minneapolis, 1972 (photo by Bruce Goldstein)
Spear was one of the nation’s first openly gay politicians and served almost 30 years in the Minnesota State Senate. (In 1972, he had yet to come out publicly.) The New Riverside Cafe, at the corner of Cedar and Riverside on the West Bank, was Minneapolis’s first full-service vegetarian restaurant and one of the city’s foremost collectivist institutions. You could approximate this view today by standing just inside the entrance of Acadia Cafe. In the background, of course, is the under-construction Cedar Square West, now known as Riverside Plaza.
Photo via Minnesota Historical Society
Advertising-
Ad agency, Fallon McElligott, did this award-winning print ad for J.D. Hoyt’s Supper Club Steakhouse in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Little Known Fact:
Fallon McElligott gave the J.D. Hoyt’s Steakhouse $20,000 in creative services…
for free. Why? Restaurateur Mike Andrews offered the agency something better
than money: Creative freedom. “He said, ‘Push the envelope and go wild!” recalled Robert S. Barrie, the campaign’s art director. And that’s what he did, producing an irreverent, vegetarian-bashing campaign on a series of posters and billboards with such headlines as: ”We believe in the proper treatment of animals. Which is why we use only the finest sauces.” The campaign won an award for the agency, generated publicity, and, most importantly, helped boost business.
The original article in Business Week “printed” in 1997.
