Milton Glaser, Co-founder of New York Magazine and Creator of ‘I❤NY,’ Dies at 91
Christopher Bonanos at New York Magazine:
He wrote, too. Starting in our first issues, Glaser and his friend Jerome Snyder, the design director of Sports Illustrated, created “The Underground Gourmet,” becoming very possibly the world’s first columnists covering cheap ethnic restaurants in a sophisticated way. That sounds like no big deal now, but it was a minor revolution in 1968. As Glaser himself would explain when asked, nobody back then bothered to cover restaurants outside the white-tablecloth world, because they didn’t advertise. But as hardcore New Yorkers, Glaser and Snyder knew that a whole lot of us love nothing more than a great Chinatown dumpling joint, or a superior taco stand, or a scoop of perfect whitefish salad, or a bowl of udon. He brought all of those and more to New York’s early readership, and everyone — from the Times on down — soon started doing the same. …
In the mid-1980s, Steve Hindy and Tom Potter, the founders of a new microbrewery, came to him for a logo design. Glaser took a look at their proposed name — Brooklyn Eagle, recalling the defunct newspaper — and, as he told the story, he offered one key bit of advice. “Anheuser-Busch already has the eagle,” he told them. “You’ve got Brooklyn. That’s enough!” Brooklyn Brewery, with its swoop-y baseball-jersey logo evoking both the departed Dodgers and a swirl of beer foam, made its debut in 1988. Because it was a start-up without much money, Glaser took a stake in the company instead of a fee. Today, Brooklyn Brewery is a huge global brand — and, as Glaser told me a couple of years ago, that was the thing that made him financially independent, enough to keep him in taxicabs and then some, enthusiastically sketching, for the rest of his life.