Did Emperor Norton Really Live at the Eureka Lodgings on Commercial Street for 17 Years?
A Previously Unreported Gap in the Directory Record
The question is not whether the Emperor lived at the Eureka Lodgings, at 624 Commercial Street between Montgomery and Kearny, in San Francisco. That is one of the best-documented and most settled facts about him.
But, did he live there for seventeen years, from 1863 until his death in January 1880?
The short answer is: Maybe not.
The received wisdom of a 17-year residency at the Eureka appears to have originated with Emperor Norton’s obituaries. The Emperor died on the evening of 8 January 1880. According to the obit that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle the next morning, the Emperor had lived “in a cheap lodging-house on Commercial Street for seventeen years.”
The Morning Call, too, reported on the 9th that “[t]he Emperor had occupied a room in the Eureka Lodging House, on Commercial street [sic], for the past seventeen years.”
After initially getting the Emperor’s residence wrong on the 9th, reporting that “[h]e roomed at the Empire Lodging House, on Kearny street” — the Empire was on Commercial, two doors west of the Eureka — the Daily Alta, in a January 10th item noting the Emperor’s funeral and burial that day, referred to “the Eureka Lodging House, on Commercial Street, where he has steadily roomed for 17 years.”
For nearly a century after that, Emperor Norton’s biographers ran with this claim. It was repeated by Robert Ernest Cowan in his 1923 essay on the Emperor for the California Historical Society; by Allen Stanley Lane in his 1939 biography; by David Warren Ryder in his little volume on the Emperor published the same year; and by William Drury in his biography of 1986.
In fact, there was so little doubt about the claim that, in March 2016, the fraternity of E Clampus Vitus a.k.a. the Clampers dedicated a marble plaque, embedded in the “floor” of Empire Park at 642 Commercial Street — the former site of the Eureka Lodgings — stating that “Joshua Abraham Norton (1818–1880) began living here in 1863 and remained for the next 17 years.” [Update 9/2022: In fact, the Eureka Lodgings was located on the current site of 650/652 Commercial. To learn more, see our September 2022 article here.]
Plaque at Empire Park, San Francisco, dedicated by the Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus on 25 March 2016. Photograph: John Lumea
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IT IS TRUE that 1863 marked a transition in Emperor Norton’s residential arrangements.
After declaring himself Emperor on 17 September 1859, Joshua Norton was not listed in the 1860 directory for San Francisco. When he reappeared in the 1861 directory, he was listed as living at the Metropolitan Hotel, southwest corner of Sansome and Bush Streets; and he was listed at same address in the directory of 1862.
On 1 April 1863, there was auction of the complete contents of the Metropolitan, which was to be demolished — and, it was demolished by June — to make way for construction of the Cosmopolitan Hotel, which opened on the same site in 1864.
It’s reasonable to guess that residents of the Metropolitan Hotel — including the Emperor — were vacated by late 1862 or early 1863. (To learn more, see our April 2015 article here.)
Had Emperor Norton moved to 624 Commercial Street in 1862 or 1863, he wouldn’t have been moving to the Eureka Lodgings. At the time, 624 / 626 Commercial was known as the Benton House, and the owner/proprietor was Felix J. Hanlon.
A sidebar on how the Eureka Lodgings came to be is instructive.
The first listing showing the Benton House is in the 1859 directory. Felix Hanlon most recently had been a bookkeeper at the What Cheer House.
By the time of the 1863 listing, there is an address:
Not until the 1864 directory is there a listing for the “Eureka Lodgings” at this address. In fact, the 1864 directory has a listing for both the Benton House at 624 / 626 and the Eureka Lodgings at 624 — which suggests the possibility of some kind of business arrangement in which the new proprietor of the Eureka got a toe in by taking part of the building but not all of it.
Note that the new proprietor of the Eureka was Aaron B. Babcock — not “Alfred Babcock,” as Norton biographer William Drury incorrectly has it. Babock’s 1864 listing:
By the time of the 1865 directory, Felix Hanlon had moved his Benton House to a new location at Fifth and Mission Streets…
…and Aaron Babcock was the sole proprietor of the Eureka Lodgings at 624 Commercial Street.
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HERE’S THE THING…
Joshua Norton is not listed in the San Francisco directories of 1863 or 1864.
His “disappearance” from a single year’s directory might be rationalized as a reporting or clerical error. Two consecutive years are harder to dismiss or explain away.
What the directories tell us — and what we’ve not seen previously reported: After the 1862 directory, where he is listed as residing at the Metropolitan Hotel, the Emperor does not appear again until the 1865 directory — the first time he is listed at 624 Commercial a.k.a. the Eureka Lodgings.
This suggests that Emperor Norton did not arrive at the Eureka until sometime between the information deadlines for the 1864 directory (published in October 1864) and the 1865 directory (published in November 1865) — so, sometime between late summer 1864 and late summer 1865.
Of course, one can speculate as to why the Emperor did not appear in the directories of 1863 and 1864. Perhaps, the Emperor’s forced departure from the Metropolitan Hotel marked the beginning of a peripatetic period during which he never stayed in any one place for long enough to be listed as living there. Perhaps the Emperor was unwell during this period and one or more landlords respected his need for privacy by complying with his request to remain unlisted.
Ultimately, though, one has to go where the documentation leads — which, in Emperor Norton’s case, means directory listings and contemporaneous newspaper accounts.
The San Francisco papers continued to publish Proclamations from the Emperor and to report regularly on his comings, goings and doings during the two- or three-year period between 1863 and 1865. So, there really is no doubt that the Emperor still was in the city.
But, true as it may be that “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” Emperor Norton’s absence from the San Francisco directories of 1863 and 1864 does raise a new question as to where the Emperor was living between the time he was listed at the Metropolitan Hotel in 1862 and the time he was listed at the Eureka Lodgings in 1865.
And, it raises the possibility that Emperor Norton lived at the Eureka for closer to 14 years — rather than the 17 years that has been the “official” story for the 142 years since his death.
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A FINAL thread...
When Emperor Norton died in January 1880, David and Eva Hutchinson — then the Emperor’s landlord and landlady at the Eureka Lodgings — featured in some of the coverage.
William Drury doesn’t mention how the Hutchinsons came into the picture. He just says that they bought the Eureka from Aaron Babcock in 1869.
In fact, the Hutchinsons took over the Eureka Lodgings a year or more earlier — and, they came with a previous connection to Babcock.
David Hutchinson first appears in the San Francisco directory of 1867. There’s no residential information for him. He shows up simply as a “laborer with A.B. Babcock.”
Did Hutchinson start out at the Eureka Lodgings as a kind of handyman or “super”?
The 1867 directory was published in September 1867. By the time the 1868 directory was published in October of that year, Aaron Babcock isn’t listed at all. And, it is David Hutchinson’s name — not Babcock’s — that is listed for 624 Commercial in the Lodgings category of the business section.
Assuming that Emperor Norton arrived at the Eureka sometime in 1865, it probably was Aaron Babcock who initially rented the Emperor his room. But, depending on the exact timing of when the Emperor arrived and when Babcock assumed full ownership of 624 Commercial and renamed it the Eureka Lodgings, it’s not impossible that the Emperor took his room there when it still was known as the Benton House — and that his “admitting landlord” was Felix Hanlon.
Either way, it appears that Aaron Babcock was the Emperor’s landlord for only two years or so — and that the Hutchinsons were his landlord and landlady for closer to twelve.
Very likely, when Emperor Norton died in January 1880, he was the Hutchinsons’ “senior tenant” — the one who had lived at the Eureka longer than anyone else and who truly was “part of the furniture” there.
No doubt, this — together with the fact that the Hutchinsons seem to have been genuinely fond of the Emp — goes a long way towards explaining why they took a couple of his things to remember him by.
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