The Eastern Approach to the Imperial Palace

[This piece has been updated to reflect my September 2022 research showing that the Eureka Lodgings at 624 Commercial Street, where Emperor Norton lived from 1864/65 until his death in 1880, was located on the current site of 650/652 Commercial — not on the site of Empire Park at 642 Commercial, as previously believed. Learn more here.]

From sometime between summer 1864 and summer 1865 until his death in January 1880, Emperor Norton is documented to have lived at the Eureka Lodgings, a 50-cent-per-night boarding house on the north side of Commercial Street, mid-block between Montgomery Street on the east end and Kearny Street on the west. * 

Today, the former site of the Eureka is occupied by a 4-story apartment building at 650/652 Commercial.

For the first several years that the Emperor lived on Commercial Street, the Eureka's three-doors-down neighbor was the Morning Call, the newspaper where Samuel Clemens — soon to become famous as Mark Twain — had a third-floor desk in the summer of 1864.

This past week, we discovered these two photographs that show the western side of Montgomery Street between Commercial and Clay — Clay is the next east-west street to the north of Commercial — with new glimpses of the Montgomery end of Commercial in 1865 and 1866, just a couple of years after Emperor Norton moved in.

The Emperor would have been very familiar with these views.

Sam Clemens would, too.
 

Northwest corner of Commercial and Montgomery Streets, San Francisco, 1865. Montgomery runs north-south in the foreground. Emperor Norton's palace, at the Eureka Lodgings, was a half-block west along Commercial. Photograph uncredited. Source: San Francisco Public Library.

Northwest corner of Commercial and Montgomery Streets, San Francisco, 1866. Montgomery runs north-south in the foreground. Emperor Norton's palace, at the Eureka Lodgings, was a half-block west along Commercial. Photograph uncredited. Source: San Francisco Public Library.

* This article originally dated Emperor Norton’s arrival at the Eureka Lodgings as “late 1862 / early 1863.” But, our subsequent research, published in January 2022, points to a later arrival.

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