Vintage Rainforest Cafe Bloomington, Minnesota T-Shirt 90s

Before there was a restaurant, there was a house. Steven Schussler couldn’t get anyone to fund his jungle-themed restaurant idea, so in 1989 he converted his suburban Minneapolis home into a working prototype — waterfalls, aquariums, live tropical birds, dense vegetation throughout. At various points a baboon and a pair of 150-pound tortoises lived there. He spent over half a million dollars turning his house into a sales pitch.

It worked. Casino developer Lyle Berman, who had turned him down repeatedly, finally led the investor group, and the first Rainforest Cafe opened at the Mall of America in 1994. Within a week the wait for a table ran three hours. The animatronic gorillas and elephants came from a custom shop in Florida, around $20,000 for a single mechanical elephant.

The sleeve on this one reads Mall of America, and the graphic is marked © HABITAT XCIV — 1994, the opening year, from the original location.

A shirt from the first one, printed the year the house finally became a restaurant.