There are mobile homes. And there are mobile homes that whir through the night at 100 miles per hour, dusting the countryside with the sound of tinkling chandeliers. These homes are about mobility of an entirely different sort.
Car 50 fits the latter category.
Parked under Marina City, in a mist of dust and murky light, Car 50 is the private railroad car of one Isaac Tigrett.
He is the (rather) eccentric founder and CEO of House of Blues Entertainment Inc., a multidimensional company that owns four concert halls/restaurants across the country. The newest House of Blues opened last month in Chicago at the corncob complex.
Like everything Tigrett touches (he is also the Midas behind the Hard Rock Cafe restaurant chain), Car 50 is no ordinary place. It is a roving palace, swathed in lush fabrics and crowned with an assortment of jewels–antique crystal chandeliers, European paintings, Buddhist thang-kas that are rolled up and used as window shades, teak panels from a maharajah’s palace in India.
There is an explanation for the mystic elements. Tigrett is a southern Baptist turned Hindu. He likes to express that spirituality in the decor of his clubs and home(s).
The mobile home has been parked down-under Marina City since October, when Tigrett pulled into town to commandeer final construction on the club. And no, Car 50 is not open to the public.
“It is a beautiful thing, but it is most beautiful when it is running down the rails,” says Tigrett, who tracks about 50,000 miles a year and this afternoon, glides about the darkened rail car like a phantom. He wears well his suit of black and “aura” of exhaled Camels.
In its most functional sense, Car 50 is Tigrett’s means of transportation and his hotel room.
He hooks the carriage on back of an Amtrak “going anywhere” and for about $1.80 a mile, travels between his other clubs in Hollywood, New Orleans and Cambridge, Mass. He eats, sleeps and works on board.
But in more ethereal terms, the rail car is his “dream come true.”
“This was a car built for my family in the 1920s,” explains the 48-year-old Tennessee native, who opened his first Hard Rock Cafe in London at age 22 and sold off his portion of the empire 17 years later, in 1988, for $108 million.
He is not the only one with business sense in the family.
Isaac Burton Tigrett I, his great-uncle and namesake, founded the Gulf Mobile & Ohio railroad. He commissioned Car 50 in 1927, which was not unusual for a man of his influence. Corporate magnates, celebrities and rich folk traveled via their own rail cars during the heyday of the track, the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s.
After the elder Isaac died, the railroad continued to use Car 50, into the 1970s. Enter Isaac Burton Tigrett II.
Time and money
He found the immobile car in 1989 “with a little railroad in Arkansas,” bought it and poured 19 months and an undisclosed six-digit figure into refurbishing the carriage, which had suffered considerable damage in a fire. The car’s mahogany walls are one of the few remaining, original elements.
In 1991, Car 50, now worth an estimated $3 million, took to the rails again.
“His car is unique. It’s very, very individual to his taste,” says Diane Elliott, executive director of the American Association of Private Railroad Car Owners, based in Washington, D.C. Elliott ranks Tigrett’s car as one of the most extravagant that she has seen.
Currently, about 500 private rail cars are still in existence in this country, according to Elliott. Of them, she continues, only about 150 are certified to ride along with Amtrak, which maintains the highest mechanical standards.
“I wanted to create the finest private railroad car that’s ever been built. I saw the one Queen Victoria had built for her and I said, `I can beat her,’ ” says the entrepreneur, who confesses his real love to be “designing.”
Shopping must rank way up there too.
Tigrett regularly scours the globe in search of art, artifacts (moldings, panels, doors) and furnishings for his clubs and homes. He keeps the overflow in a warehouse in Los Angeles, where he also keeps his real home.
Luxury fits all
The California Mediterranean-style house, which Tigrett, a widower, shares with his 9-year-old daughter, Augusta, counts 8,700 square feet, six bedrooms, a swimming pool, tennis court and three garages.
Car 50 is a speck of that. The rail car, which has its own source of electricity and water and sewerage, is an oversize shoe box measuring 87 feet long by a mere 9 feet wide. The aisle that cuts through the car offers just 2 feet of breadth.
Into that unwieldy space went all the makings of gracious living: a formal sitting room (observation room, in train talk), three elegant staterooms (two marble-clad bathrooms among them), a velvet dining room and fashionable, stainless-steel kitchen.
Tigrett turned a stall-size bathroom into an electronics center, complete with stereo, audiovisual equipment, telephones, fax machine, fire and burglar alarms.
For all the temptation to label the car “tiny,” it does not seem so. Fantasy is the better description, like stepping inside a Faberge egg.
The trip begins in the observation room, where a thick coating of moody, jewel-toned textiles spins the senses.
Tigrett used beaded and embroidered fabric, actually scraps of old clothing from the region around the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, to cover the walls and ceiling. A contemporary Oriental carpet hugs the floor. Pieces of old Oriental carpets were used to reupholster wing chairs.
Elaborately carved teak panels run across the walls, like a frieze.
“I think this is the most peaceful place I’ve ever been in my life,” says Tigrett, settling into a nook in the room and nodding toward the wooden panels. He got them from an Indian maharajah, who was dismantling his palace.
“This wood came from a prayer room, where his family had priests intoning mantras for 200 years,” says Tigrett. “This wood is definitely intoned.”
Depictions of various Hindu gods can be spotted throughout the car and the House of Blues. A large sculpture of Ganesa, the elephant-headed Hindu god of good fortune, is enshrined in a private room of the club. A smaller depiction of the same god hangs over Tigrett’s bed.
Because the rail car is so compact, Tigrett had to be clever about space.
In the dining room, a desk-by-day folds up and out into an elegant dining table by night. A “skirt” of tassels on a velvet tufted banquette hides a lower storage drawer.
Beds are likewise nimble, folding down and sliding out, making it possible for the carriage to sleep six passengers.
And back in the observation room, a television pops out of a high wall from behind a carved panel, with the turn of a beehive-shaped knob.
Along for the ride
Tigrett says his L.A. home looks very much like this–the artwork being predominantly religious in nature, unlike his clubs, where Tigrett’s enormous collection of folk art prevails.
Some of the more outstanding pieces in the rail car include Belgian stained glass church windows, now inset in a dining room wall, and a large, 19th Century English painting of a cherubic-looking Puck from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” It claims almost an entire wall in Tigrett’s stateroom.
But Tigrett insists, the real beauty is in the ride. Others agree:
“It’s kind of like riding in a Bentley. It floats along very nicely,” says John Lyons, a Boston club owner, who works for Tigrett as a consultant and who calls himself a “devotee of the track.”
One of Lyons’ favorite trips: overnight from New Orleans to Chicago, crossing into Cairo, Ill., where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers converge. Picture dusk washing over the skies, a folding chair, the outside back deck of the train car.
“There is this really cool truss you go over,” Lyons explains. “It’s about a mile long and it’s literally the width of a track. And, it’s really high up. So when you’re sitting on the back deck and you look over the left and right of the car, all you see is water–way, way down.”
Tigrett prefers a less unnerving image. Picture those big wing chairs again, thang-kas rolled way up so the countryside rolls in, the train zipping along at top speed, the “lulling effect” kicking in.
“The chandeliers,” says Tigrett, “tinkle the whole time.”
