The Great American Pyramid

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. Memphis, Tennessee, is home to many historic landmarks like Graceland and Beale Street. But one of their biggest tourist magnets is a Bass Pro Shop. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Usually, Bass Pro is the place to buy hunting and fishing gear. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s producer Chris Producer.

CHRIS BERUBE: But the one in Memphis–it’s less of a store and more of a camo-colored amusement park. On the main floor, there are fiberglass cypress trees that are about 100 feet tall. And there’s an enclosure with baby alligators. They have a fake swamp that is filled with real fish and a crossbow range and an arcade where kids can take target practice with plastic guns, which gave this pacifist Canadian a few moments of pause. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Across the way I see a man, showing his infant child how to load a gun. It’s a little unnerving. 

ROMAN MARS: It can feel completely surreal to be inside the Memphis Bass Pro, and making it double strange is the fact that the store itself is a 32-story, stainless steel pyramid. 

CHRIS BERUBE: The giant pyramid is hard to miss. The building itself is about two thirds the height of the Pyramids of Giza. And the base is about the size of three Walmarts. It is the first thing you see driving into Memphis on Interstate 40. On one side, you have, you know, glass office towers–typical downtown stuff. And then the other side? Wham! Giant pyramid covered in reflective, stainless steel panels and a Bass Pro logo that’s over 75 feet tall. I went to check out the Pyramid earlier this year, and for journalism purposes, I actually stayed inside a hotel connected to the Pyramid. It’s rustically called the Big Cypress Lodge. My room had three pieces of taxidermy and no windows, unless you count this little deck area that overlooks the sales floor. 

CHRIS BERUBE: It’s got two chairs, two rocking chairs, mosquito netting, in case mosquitoes come in from the Bass Pro Shop, I guess… 

CHRIS BERUBE: I would look out onto the bustling store and then stare in awe at the spire of this giant pyramid, hundreds of feet up. 

ROMAN MARS: The Memphis Pyramid hasn’t always been a Bass Pro. 35 years ago, civic leaders in Memphis had a totally different plan for it. And it’s had a few tenants over the years before becoming a woodsy mall. 

CHRIS BERUBE: The story of the Great American Pyramid is long and completely bizarre. And its trajectory shows how, in architecture and urban planning, the life of a building can be impossible to predict. 

ROMAN MARS: It might sound ridiculous to build a pyramid in modern times, let alone building one in a major American city. But for the past 200 years, every Western power has borrowed design ideas from ancient Egypt. 

CHRIS ELLIOTT: After the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, where you can see a lot of influence in architecture, art, furnishings, and so forth. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Dr. Chris Elliott is an Egyptologist, who’s currently a visiting fellow at the University of Southampton. He says you could see Egyptian designs everywhere in the architecture and the monuments of Western Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

CHRIS ELLIOTT: I mean, I’m fond of paraphrasing the famous lines from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. “It appears that any nation in possession of an empire must be in want of an obelisk.”

ROMAN MARS: That trend was called Egyptomania, and it jumped over to America in the 19th century. Designers were putting sphinx heads on chairs and designing public buildings with faux Egyptian accents. 

CHRIS ELLIOTT: I think part of this was showing that you weren’t just nouveau riche. You were traveled. You were educated. You had taste as well. 

CHRIS BERUBE: You can also see Egyptomania in public buildings like courthouses and city halls that are made to look Egyptian. The Washington Monument? That’s just one big old Egyptian obelisk. 

ROMAN MARS: The city of Memphis, Tennessee, is perhaps the peak of this trend. Memphis was named after the capital of ancient Egypt. And the city’s founders picked the name because Memphis, Tennessee, is nestled beside America’s most powerful river, the Mississippi. 

CHRIS ELLIOTT: There’s this longstanding tradition of the Mississippi as the American Nile. Apart from anyone else, Abraham Lincoln actually used that metaphor. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So naturally the city of Memphis needed its own big ancient Egyptian attraction. Obelisk was kind of taken because, you know, the Washington Monument. So instead they went with a pyramid. A wooden pyramid was constructed in 1897 to represent the city at the Centennial Fair in Nashville. 

ROMAN MARS: The wooden pyramid wasn’t used for anything after the fair, so they tore it down. But a local artist revived the pyramid idea about half a century later. 

MARTHA PARK: In the 1950s, this artist named Mark Hartz drew up a plan for three pyramids. 

CHRIS BERUBE: This is Martha Park, a local author and illustrator who has written about the Memphis Pyramid. 

MARTHA PARK: They would be bronze-colored–along the riverfront–and they would be, like, two thirds the size of the pyramids in Giza. 

ROMAN MARS: The trio of bronze pyramids were never built. But over the years, the idea of a permanent, gigantic pyramid for downtown Memphis stuck around, especially among civic leaders who wanted outsiders to think of Memphis for something other than Elvis and the blues. 

MARTHA PARK: I think it’s this kind of attempt to have this monolithic representation of the city–like the bean in Chicago or the arch in St. Louis. It will just mean Memphis to other people’s brains. 

CHRIS BERUBE: For years, the Pyramid was just this quirky, unrealized civic project. But in the mid ’80s, the planets finally lined up. The city needed a new downtown landmark. The college basketball team, the Memphis Tigers, were selling out all of their home games, and they needed a bigger arena. 

ROMAN MARS: At the same time, it was the peak of postmodernism in American architecture. Cities all over the U.S. were commissioning buildings that borrowed details from Greece, ancient Rome, and–yes–ancient Egypt. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So, city and county officials formed a public building authority and announced they would spend $39 million on a brand new basketball arena in the shape of a giant pyramid. The Memphis Building Authority chose to construct the Pyramid with stainless steel instead of bronze. And it picked a location in the city’s historic Pinch District. 

JIMMY OGLE: “Pinch” was a name from the Irish settlers that came in from the Irish potato famine in the 1860s. It was the “pinch gut” district because their stomachs had the pinched-in look like a skinny man.

CHRIS BERUBE: That’s Jimmy Ogle. He used to be the official historian for Shelby County, which includes Memphis. He says the Pinch District had gone through waves of immigration before it was basically cut in half by a highway in the 1960s. 

JIMMY OGLE: It was after urban renewal. But all that was going on in the ’60s with the urban renewal of all cities, and we called it “urban removal” in a lot of ways. 

CHRIS BERUBE: City leaders felt the Pyramid could help rejuvenate the economy and bring more people into downtown Memphis. Plus, there was this big tract of land in the Pinch right alongside the Mississippi River, the fabled Nile of America. 

ROMAN MARS: In 1988, the city and county voted to build the Pyramid in the Pinch District with public money. The arena would give the neighborhood a shot in the arm, it would give the Tigers another 10,000 seats, and it would give this city the pyramid-shaped monolith it had always dreamed of. 

CHRIS BERUBE: A unique aspect of the pyramid shape is that it would have a lot of unused space around the arena. And all this space attracted a couple of enterprising businessmen. 

ROMAN MARS: A local entrepreneur named John Tigrett helped convince the city to build the Pyramid partly because he wanted to help run it. Tigrett was famous for owning the patent on the drinky-duck toy that bobs up and down in a glass of water, among other more serious business ventures. But in the 1980s, he saw the Pyramid as a great opportunity. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Tigrett was interested in building some attractions inside the building. To help with this, Tigrett recruited another businessman named Sidney Shlenker. Shlenker had helped open the Astrodome in Houston, and he was the owner of the Denver Nuggets basketball team. 

RUSS SIMONS: He was a crazy bastard. He couldn’t finish his first idea before starting the second. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Russ Simons was the general manager of the Memphis Pyramid in the early ’90s, and he says Sidney Shlenker was a very enthusiastic salesman. 

RUSS SIMONS: He was a genius. He had to be, you know, probably just below Barnum in terms of his ability to sell. I’d put him a half step below P. T. Barnum. 

ROMAN MARS: Tigrett and Shlenker struck a deal with the city. Basically, the city and county would construct the Pyramid with public funds, and the businessmen would install $20 million worth of attractions throughout the building. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Shlenker had a ton of ideas for the Pyramid, many of which are summed up in this handy promotional video. 

GREAT AMERICAN PYRAMID PROMO: A new pyramid is being built, not to glorify death but as a monument that will celebrate life and man’s indomitable spirit to create–to achieve a greatness that will reach to the stars and span centuries–a greatness that will say, “Feel the power of the Great American Pyramid…” 

CHRIS BERUBE: I can’t play this whole video because it’s, like, 14 minutes long, but here’s a quick summary: A narrator claims the Pyramid would include attractions for the whole family, like a music hall of fame, a Hard Rock Cafe, the world’s largest transistor radio, and– Sure, why not? A laser show…

GREAT AMERICAN PYRAMID PROMO: And just as the pyramids of old pull our thoughts to Egyptian culture, so too will this new pyramid be a calling card for the best of American civilization… 

ROMAN MARS: The Pyramid would also feature a state-of-the-art funicular called the “inclinator.” The inclinator was supposed to be an elevator running on a 45-degree incline along the side of the building. With the inclinator, tourists could travel to an observation deck and marvel at the Mississippi River below. 

CHRIS BERUBE: The hype was very strong. The video even compared the Pyramid to some of the greatest wonders of the world, like the Sydney Opera House and the Arc de Triomphe and even the Pyramids of Giza. Then, it suggests the Pyramid will probably be better than all of those other things.

MARTHA PARK: The way that they have it come up from the bottom of the screen and then overtake the picture of the Pyramids of Giza from behind it is like, “Forget all you know about pyramids, baby!”

CHRIS BERUBE: I cannot overstate how much stuff was being promised here. The Memphis Pyramid would be a totally unique building–an arena and a museum and a theme park and a big elevator and like a dozen other things… 

RUSS SIMONS: The vision for the Pyramid… I’ll just say it was extraordinary. If that vision had been able to be brought to life, it would have been unlike anything else in the world. 

CHRIS BERUBE: The city began construction on the Pyramid in 1989 while the two businessmen drew up plans for what to put inside. Tigrett and Shlenker told the public they were going to spend millions of dollars on the Pyramid and the surrounding neighborhood. 

ROMAN MARS: But it slowly became clear that their plans weren’t the most realistic, at least not at the scale they had promised. Shlenker commissioned the inclinator, but he didn’t have enough money to mount it on the side of the building–and it was abandoned. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Pretty soon, their struggles became obvious to the people of Memphis. 

MARTHA PARK: If you talk to people in Memphis about Sidney Shlenker, it’s very like, “Shlenker…” You know? It’s like this kind of “Newman” kind of pronunciation. 

ROMAN MARS: In the end, Shlenker and Tigrett had a public falling out, their Pyramid company filed for bankruptcy, and the city took them off the project all together. 

CHRIS BERUBE: The Pyramid’s construction was finished in 1991. The actual building was completed without Tigrett and Shlenker because the construction was largely paid for by public money. 

ROMAN MARS: When the Pyramid opened, it was the largest pyramid in America and, by some estimates, the sixth largest pyramid on Earth. But the project was over budget, costing the public $65 million instead of $39 million. And it didn’t have any theme parks or laser shows or even the famed inclinator. In the end, it just was an arena. 

CHRIS BERUBE: The Pyramid opened to great fanfare in November 1991. But it was clear there were some unusual kinks to work out. Take, for example, what happened on opening night when country music legends Naomi and Winona Judd played a concert to launch the new venue. 

ROMAN MARS: Russ Simons was the general manager at the time, and he says one aspect of the building that wasn’t ready on opening night was the plumbing system. 

RUSS SIMONS: The Pyramid sits below grade–sits right on the level of the river. The plumbing designer had… We were supposed to have two, three thousand gallon per minute lift stations to lift… 

CHRIS BERUBE: Look, there’s a very technical explanation for all this, but basically the toilets overflowed and immediately flooded the building. The stage had to be sandbagged to stop water from getting into the electrical equipment. Russ remembers how, despite all this, the Judds heroically got on stage and they still did their show. 

RUSS SIMONS: So, myself and our head of guest experience–Rick Ferdet–we used a fireman carry to lift Naomi and Winona Judd to the stage. They had carried their shoes. They got on the stairs. They got their shoes on–sort of told me good luck. And they got up there and brought the house lights down and played their show from beginning to end. We lost a lot of shoes that night. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Russ and his team managed to get things cleaned up, and they fixed the plumbing. But there was another challenge to using the Pyramid as a concert venue. 

ROMAN MARS: Most arenas are optimized for sound. By contrast, a pyramid shape is less than ideal for concerts. Here’s Martha Park. 

MARTHA PARK: The point at the top of the pyramid–it’s like all the sound goes straight up–it doesn’t disperse–and then just goes “boom” and bounces back down to you. Acoustically, there’s nowhere for the sound to go, except just back and forth. 

JIMMY OGLE: And December was Van Halen. That’s when they figured out they didn’t have enough acoustics in the building, and it was just a nightmare–like having a concert in a racquetball court. It’s just a terrible sound. 

CHRIS BERUBE: After the construction hype and the toilet flood and the big echo, within a few weeks, the Pyramid started to find its footing. Russ Simons says his team added more soundbaffling. And Memphians came out in droves–of course to see concerts, but also the arena’s major draw: college basketball. 

BASKETBALL COMMENTATOR: And here is an exterior look at this stainless steel and glass beauty that now is dominating the skyline and certainly the drive along the river here. It holds just over 20,000, and every seat is filled tonight… 

ROMAN MARS: In 1992, the college basketball team, the Memphis Tigers, were led by a young phenom named Penny Hardaway. They made the NCAA tournament, and their success drew rabid fans to the new stadium, which they nicknamed The Tomb of Doom.

CHRIS BERUBE: The Pyramid became a place to be in Memphis. The Tigers had great crowds. And the arena drew in big names for concerts, like Bruce Springsteen and The Grateful Dead. And later? A prize fight between Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis. 

ROMAN MARS: After a few years, the management team even started booking events in the unused space, but on a smaller scale than what was imagined by Shlenker and Tigrett. They booked an exhibition of artifacts from the Titanic and, yes, a display of treasures from ancient Egypt. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Okay, sure, the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas took away its crown as biggest pyramid in America in 1993. But that didn’t matter. All in all, it seemed like the Pyramid was becoming a success. I wish I could say this is how the story ends–with the Pyramid, in spite of everything, rising in a blaze of steel and fiberglass and ancient Egyptian kitsch to become Memphis’ beloved sports arena, living happily ever after. Of course, this is not what happened next. 

ROMAN MARS: Basketball had made the Memphis Pyramid. And a decade later, basketball nearly destroyed it. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Civic leaders in Memphis had always wanted a big league sports franchise. And in 2001, they finally got their chance. 

CBC NEWS: Well the team’s been in the league six years. And in that time, the Vancouver Grizzlies won 98 games. They lost another 352. So, an announcement today that it’s applied to move to an American city comes as no surprise… 

ROMAN MARS: The Vancouver Grizzlies were the worst team in the NBA. And the city of Vancouver never showed up to the games. In 2001, on short notice, the owner of the Grizzlies decided to move them out of Canada and into the U.S. 

CHRIS BERUBE: And with that, the Memphis Grizzlies were born. Though in the great tradition of the Utah Jazz, the name did not make a lot of geographic sense. 

JIMMY OGLE: This franchise came from Vancouver. That’s why we’re named the Grizzlies. Where’s a grizzly bear around here, you know? 

ROMAN MARS: The Grizzlies played their first three seasons in the Pyramid. But the NBA made it clear that the Pyramid could not be a long-term home for the Grizzlies because it simply wasn’t up to NBA standards. 

ZACK MCMILLIN: Basketball arenas were sort of undergoing this evolution. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Here’s Zack McMillin. He covered basketball for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Zack says, in the early 2000s, the business of sports in North America went through a rapid change.

ZACK MCMILLIN: You were moving from a time when the point of a basketball arena was to get as many people as you could into the seats–balance supply and demand as best you could. Maybe within five or six years, if you built a new arena, you really put an emphasis on the luxury suites. You wanted people paying premium prices to rent out those suites, and that’s really how you could create the business model to make it work.

CHRIS BERUBE: Basketball in North America was becoming a big money sport, and that came with a lot of expectations. Arenas needed luxury boxes. They also needed fancy modern training facilities and a massive digital scoreboard and spacious locker rooms and lots of things the Memphis Pyramid lacked. So, the Grizzlies’ ownership made a fateful choice. They decided the Pyramid wasn’t worth the hassle. A new arena was built using public money, and the FedEx Forum opened in 2004. It became the new home for the Grizzlies. And to add insult to injury, it was clearly visible from the Pyramid. 

ROMAN MARS: The new arena was much more conventional than the Pyramid. For starters, it was actually arena-shaped. 

MARTHA PARK: The fact that it’s fun and it’s a building that works well and the acoustics aren’t maddening and stuff like that… 

CHRIS BERUBE: Soon, the Memphis Tigers also moved to the Forum. And major concerts started getting booked there, too. There was still an occasional show at the Tomb of Doom. But in 2007, Bob Seger played the last concert ever held there. 

ROMAN MARS: The Memphis Pyramid went from being a center of civic life to having zero tenants and zero prospects.

CHRIS BERUBE: While a pyramid is famously a very stable shape, there are good reasons they don’t show up all that much in modern architecture. For example, pyramids just don’t use vertical space very efficiently. Anyway, a few ideas were proposed for the Memphis Pyramid, but nothing seemed like an obvious fit. 

RUSS SIMONS: It could have been a museum. Like, you could have put attractions in there. But at the end of the day, why would you want to own the whole thing? Clearly, it never made sense to anybody. 

ROMAN MARS: The Pyramid was no longer useful. And it was a target for negative press, including attention from a very confused, very misinformed, very malicious radio host. 

NEWSCASTER: Thanks to radio talk show conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the empty arena is again in the national spotlight as a cornerstone of one of his rants against the occult. 

ALEX JONES: And you can see the Memphis Pyramid built back in the early 1990s… 

CHRIS BERUBE: In classic Alex Jones fashion, this conspiracy wasn’t really based on anything except a misreading of some internet rumors. 

NEWSCASTER: Jones’ so-called “facts” are mostly slanderous in the internet video entitled Devil Pyramid Rotting in Memphis. 

ALEX JONES: You lose! We win! Your little devil palace is falling down…

CHRIS BERUBE: By 2008, the Pyramid laid off all of their employees, except for one guy, basically a lighthouse keeper, just there to oversee the place. Soon all the Pyramid was being used for was one-off stuff like firefighter training. 

JIMMY OGLE: So now you have this big old 20,000 seat, 321 foot tall pyramid. A neat building. You can’t put anything in. 

CHRIS BERUBE: It seemed like the Great American Pyramid had become the city’s great folly. Nobody wanted to knock it down, but nobody wanted to move in either. That is, until someone took up residence and completely transformed the space. 

NEWSCASTER #2: This is a live look. Construction is well underway at the Pyramid in downtown Memphis to turn the former Tomb of Doom into one of the largest Bass Pro shops in the country… 

ROMAN MARS: In 2010, the hunting and fishing store Bass Pro Shops announced a plan to buy the Pyramid and use it as their flagship location, which turned out to be the biggest Bass Pro shop in America. The city of Memphis was more than happy to lease to Bass Pro because they were thrilled that anyone was interested in taking over the property. 

CHRIS BERUBE: In 2015, the new store, dubbed Bass Pro Shops at the Pyramid, was opened. Now, look… It doesn’t make a lot of obvious sense to take a giant pyramid-shaped basketball arena and to make it into an outdoorsy amusement park/store. But when you think about it, nothing really makes sense for this building. 

MARTHA PARK: Ultimately, to me, I think the Pyramid was a really absurd plan and that the Bass Pro just happens to feel, like, just absurd enough to work when other things were maybe too serious. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Legend has it that Bass Pro bought the Pyramid because their CEO, Johnny Morris, was on a fishing expedition that caught a 30-pound catfish on the Mississippi River, which he saw as a good omen. While I have a lot of questions about this story, Morris and Bass Pro did not respond to my request for an interview. 

ROMAN MARS: But there’s another less magical reason Bass Pro probably wanted this space. Memphis, Tennessee, is close to some of the nation’s best hunting and fishing spots. 

JIMMY OGLE: But when you think about it, you got the Mississippi River right there. And 70% of the migratory waterfowl fly from Canada down through this waterway here–the Mississippi waterway. So, over here in Stuttgart, Arkansas–60 miles to our east–is the duck calling championships each year. The duck calling capital of the world. 

CHRIS BERUBE: When I visited the Pyramid earlier this year, I was pretty into it. I loved taking rides on the Pyramid’s ludicrously tall elevator, though I have to tell you, it’s a regular vertical elevator. They never ended up building the inclinator. On the elevator, visitors are regaled by a recording from a local TV fishing legend, who tells the story of Johnny Morris’ party catching that fortuitous catfish. 

BILL DANSON RECORDING: Hello, everybody! I’m Bill Danson. Did you know that you’re taking a ride on the nation’s tallest freestanding elevator? This elevator and everything you see when you look down would never have happened had it not been for one big old Mississippi River blue cat… 

CHRIS BERUBE: The elevator takes visitors up to the spire of the Pyramid, which overlooks the Mississippi River from the vantage of a glass-bottomed observation deck. It’s all pretty spectacular. And at first, I was having a lot of fun. But on my second day, my mood started to turn. Hunched over my desk, under the watchful gaze of two taxidermy deer heads, a melancholy crept in. I realized I hadn’t seen daylight for 16 hours. And to leave the building, I’d have to cross a sea of parking lots and walk under a highway to get anywhere. I started to feel a little wistful. 

MARTHA PARK: I can go kind of dark about the Bass Pro Shop with the fake cypress trees, when it’s like, you know, most of the bottomland hardwood forest in this area have been destroyed. And there’s not a lot of cypress trees just hanging out, you know? And to come into this place and it’s dark and there’s these fake cypress trees–it just can make me feel kind of sad. 

CHRIS BERUBE: I got to thinking about how this place was pitched as a project with so many civic virtues–an arena that would also host museums and redevelop a historic neighborhood. Instead, its fate was to become a mall. I have to say though, talking to Memphians about this, most of them did not share the concern. They were pretty happy about how the Pyramid turned out. 

JIMMY OGLE: The ones that wanted to have problems with it do. People that don’t like something, want to have a problem, and want to fuss about it–yeah–they’re gonna have problems with anything. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Jimmy Ogle thinks complaints like this one are missing the bigger point because what exactly was the alternative for the Pyramid? 

JIMMY OGLE: This would have been a drain on the city if left vacant. What can you do to get the private sector involved? So, these are private dollars. So, it’s the stimulus, jobs, all the other stuff, tax revenues… 

ROMAN MARS: The Bass Pro has become a tourist magnet, bringing in millions of people a year. In a way, it’s now fulfilling its original promise. 

JIMMY OGLE: Totally safe environment–enclosed–a wonderland of outdoor things. It’s just the kids’ eyes just pop out of their heads when they go out on that floor. 

CHRIS BERUBE: The people I spoke to are largely at peace with how everything turned out. I was surprised to discover even my Egyptologist seemed pretty cool with it. Here’s Chris Elliott again.

CHRIS ELLIOTT: I suppose the simplest way I can put it is to say that it makes me happy that the Pyramid is still there. How many pyramids of this size have you got in the United States? Not enough, I think, to just sort of casually dismiss it. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Many urbanists agree with this, and they say the Memphis Pyramid is a success story. The Pyramid has become this place of rebirth–an abandoned building that has found new life despite formidable odds. But it’s also a place of death. Of course, an Egyptian pyramid is a tomb. And the Memphis Pyramid–it represents the death of intention. 

MARTHA PARK: I guess, when I think about the Pyramid, what I think it means is that any attempt you have at creating a space to project a single story is ultimately going to fail and that what might work better is letting the world come in instead and letting you know what that space could mean and to be open to a space telling a different story of itself than the one you expected. 

CHRIS BERUBE: The Memphis Pyramid is proof that no matter what architects and planners and dreamers envision for a place, ultimately every building has to find its own way. 

ROMAN MARS: In 1991, Russ Simons made a shocking discovery at the top of the Memphis Pyramid. We’ll tell you about that after this. 

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: And we are back with Chris Berube. Hey, Chris. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Hey, Roman. So, Roman, I have to tell you about a footnote in the saga of the Memphis Pyramid. So, you remember we talked about a guy named John Tigrett in the story?

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, of course. He was one of the businessmen who wanted to run all the attractions beneath the bleachers of the Pyramid. 

CHRIS BERUBE: That’s right. So, I bring him up because, actually, I want to talk about John Tigrett’s son for a second. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Okay. So, John had a son named Isaac Tigrett, who was famous, among other things, for co-creating the Hard Rock Cafe back in the 1970s. 

ROMAN MARS: Of the ubiquitous t-shirt fame–the Hard Rock Cafe? 

CHRIS BERUBE: That’s exactly the one, yes. So, he’s a really interesting character. Like, Isaac Tigrett, you know, created the Hard Rock Cafe, famously traveled across America on his own rail car for a while… There’s just so much going on in this guy’s biography. It’s really interesting. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s remarkable. Okay. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So, when the Pyramid was being built–John Tigrett–one of his promises was he was going to bring in his son Isaac to put a Hard Rock Cafe in the Pyramid, right? And that never ended up happening, but the son, Isaac Tigrett… He did put something else in the Pyramid. So, Isaac had access while it was being built. And when nobody was looking, he snuck in and he went up to the top of the Pyramid and he hid a good luck charm in the rafters–and he never told anybody. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh, a good-luck charm! Okay, tell me about it. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So, Roman, this whole thing is going to blow your mind. Like everything else with the Pyramid, it’s the wildest of possibilities. So, I heard this story from Russ Simons, who you may remember was the former general manager of the Pyramid in the ’90s. Isaac Tigrett got a group of people together. 

RUSS SIMONS: Somehow co-opted a security guard. They took ladders and welding equipment and everything they needed to take up those 422 steps up to the observation deck. And they welded a box that was the same color as the steel. And they welded it, and it was, like, directly in the center of how the Pyramid comes together. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So, Russ is running the Pyramid. He’s doing management stuff. And you know, he looks around and he notices this box. And he’s thinking, “Okay, that shouldn’t be there. What is this?”

RUSS SIMONS: I got my workers and Sawzalls and our equipment and all that and ladders. We traipsed up those steps and we went and we knocked the welds off and we brought the box down. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So, Russ and his team–they take down this box. They have no idea Isaac Tigrett has put it there. And they’re thinking, “Is this dangerous? Like, what is this mystery box?” So, the first thing they do is they actually call the city and the county who are like, “We’ll send some representatives over.” So, everybody gathers around, they’re looking at this box, and they all decide, “Okay, look, let’s just open it up and let’s see what’s inside.”

RUSS SIMONS: We brought the crew in, and we knocked the cover off the box. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So, Russ says he and his crew were opening it. And inside the box, there is another box. And the second box–it’s velvet. And the second box was not a normal box. It was more like a puzzle box. Like, you had to flip a bunch of switches and stuff to get it open. 

RUSS SIMONS: The box opened by swinging the sides out and up and all of that. And then the box opened. And when we opened the box, a whole bunch of gray powder came out, right? And everybody’s like, “Oh, man, what is that?”

CHRIS BERUBE: So, people are, you know, clearing out this gray powder. The dust is settling. And then they look and, inside the box, they see… a crystal skull. 

ROMAN MARS: Huh… I’m sorry, what? 

CHRIS BERUBE: So, it’s a crystal skull. It’s about the size of a fist It looks expensive. It’s like… I guess the best comparison– Roman, have you seen a bottle of Dan Aykroy’ds vodka before? 

ROMAN MARS: No, I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, I mean–look–he sells vodka in a crystal skull. It’s not terribly complicated. Anyway–okay–so nobody knows what to make of this. They’re like, “What is this?” So, it turns out Isaac Tigrett had put it up there apparently on the advice of a religious guru he was following, who told him it would bring good luck to the Pyramid. I have to be honest, the details on this are a little sketchy. I reached out to Isaac Tigrett to talk about the story. He did not get back to me. I’m sure he gets requests about this all the time. But after this, they weren’t sure what to do with the skull. So, it ended up in a vault in the Shelby County administration office. And Isaac Tigrett gets wind of this. And actually, through his mother, he managed to broker a deal. And in the end, he got the skull back from the county. 

ROMAN MARS: Wow, this is so dramatic!

CHRIS BERUBE: Oh, yeah. I mean, like everything in this story, it is just very dramatic. So, of course, the media gets a hold of this, right? And they publish a bunch of stories with headlines like, “Crystal Skull Found At The Pyramid,” “Belongs To Isaac Tigrett…” And you may remember Alex Jones was involved with all this. He had said the Pyramid was demonic, and this is the reason why. It’s because he heard about the crystal skull, and that’s the reason it became the center of this conspiracy theory. 

NEWSCASTER: Jones’ so-called facts are mostly slanderous in the internet video entitled Devil Pyramid Rotting in Memphis. But at least one of his statements is true. A crystal skull was discovered…

CHRIS BERUBE: Like everything with the Memphis Pyramid, it’s a completely unexpected twist and turn in the story. I gotta say, this is definitely one of the more unpredictable ones I’ve ever covered for the show. 

ROMAN MARS: I love it. Well, thank you so much, Chris. And thank you for venturing out to Memphis. I grew up in Memphis, so this is very exciting for me to hear more about Memphis. So, thank you.

CHRIS BERUBE: It’s my pleasure. I hope I did your hometown justice with the story, Roman. 

ROMAN MARS: You certainly did. 

99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube. Edited by Kelly Prime. Fact checking by Lara Bullens. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real and Jamilah Sandoto Sinai, with Mya Byrne playing lapsteel. 

Special thanks this week to Louis [lew-is] Graham, Harry Diament [die-uh-ment], Zach McMillin, Yang Yi, Tom Jones, and all of the delightful folks Chris spoke to at the Memphis Pyramid. 

Our Executive Producer is Kathy Tu, our Senior Editor is Delaney Hall, our Digital Director is Kurt Kohlstedt. 

The rest of the team includes Jayson DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. 

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. 

We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful, uptown… Oakland, California. 

You can find us on Bluesky, as well as our Discord server. 

If you enjoyed this episode, there’s going to be a special bonus episode all about Memphis, Tennessee, later this week. You can find it in our podcast feed or at our website, 99pi.org.