Wilkinson Row
I returned back to New Orleans in 1977 to work as the senior art director for Jim Pertuit and Associates that soon afterwards became Pertuit and Alford Advertising. The agency owned by Robert Alford and Jim Pertuit was on the one block long Wilkinson Row in the French Quarter near the Mississippi River. The studio was on the second floor of a nineteenth century building built as a stable for horses and beer wagons for the Jax Brewery that been at the end of the block. The building had been converted in the 1950s into a studio used by the advertising art department of Jax Beer. Our work space was enormous with 20 foot ceilings with skylights, exposed brick walls and massive cypress beams.
It was as much a design studio as an ad agency and our client list was varied with everything from bars, restaurants, music clubs and acts, a zoo, fight promotions, a limousine service, hotels, a museum, oil companies and alternative newspapers.
Almost everyone working there was in their twenties and the camaraderie of the staff was strong and usually didn’t end with the work day. After all it was the swinging seventies and we were in walking distance to numerous bars and music clubs in the French Quarter. Some how even after many a late night we were always back creating the next day. Years later watching the series Mad Men I would relate to and remember our reserved table at Paul Prudhomme’s new K-Pauls Restaurant around the corner, the expense account at the Royal Sonesta Hotel’s restaurant and rooftop pool bar, limo rides to concerts in the Superdome, ringside seats for heavyweight fights, comped hotel rooms and many 5 martini lunches. I moved on in 1983 to my next job from what was now Alford Advertising. The five years I worked on Wilkinson Row were definitely the most prolific and fun days of my career.
