Stereographic Photos of Emperor Norton on a Chinatown Street (Hi-Res Edition)

Nearly two-and-half years ago, in March 2018, my friend Kevin Demattia of Emperor Norton’s Boozeland, San Francisco, sent me a very intriguing image.

Kevin had just had the shocking good fortune to be able to acquire a fine-condition signed Emperor Norton promissory note — only the 40th known to exist — for a fraction of its market value; and he had taken up the sport of surfing collector news networks for information about other Norton-related artifacts.

What Kevin sent me was a screen shot of an image of an undated stereograph card with side-by-side photographs of Emperor Norton in a lively Chinatown street.

The image itself was from an online PDF of the catalog for the February 2008 auction (by the firm of Stack’s Bowers) where the card was sold.

Unfortunately, the PDF was very lo-res, so the image couldn’t be made large and clear enough to make it worth sharing.

For nearly five years, I had been hearing rumors of one or more unpublished photos of the Emperor. I suspected this was one of them. The challenge now was to locate the owner of the card and, I hoped, get a hi-res scan of the card for The Emperor Norton Trust to share.

On and off for nearly 18 months, I engaged in this detective project until finally — about a year ago — I was able to confirm my hunch as to who the owner of the card was.

I’ll leave the owner unnamed — but, suffice it to say that getting a scan was not on the menu.

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Fast forward to last Thursday, when a scan was shared with the Facebook group of the National Stereoscopic Association. Not a big scan but one that was much more legible than the image that appeared 12 years ago in the Stack’s Bowers auction catalog.

The first person to alert me to this — that day — was John Atkinson, a distant nephew of William Rulofson, whose photographic firm Bradley & Rulofson took many of the best known studio portraits of Emperor Norton.

By Friday, the scan had made its way to a couple of San Francisco history groups and pages on Facebook, and my desktop was lighting up with messages asking “Have you seen this?!!”

In fact, I already had made contact with Wolfgang Sell, of the National Stereoscopic Association, who originally had posted the scan to the Association’s Facebook group.

It turns out that Sell is the former owner of the card.

At our request, he generously has provided the long-elusive hi-res scan.

Alas, the highest-quality version of that 8,688 x 4,410-pixel file is too big to share here — but, this 18M version is pretty damned great and much bigger than what was making the rounds on Facebook last week.

We’re delighted to be able to present it here. (Click to enlarge.)

Stereocard of Emperor Norton on Chinatown Street, 1870s. Possibly taken by the studio of Thomas Houseworth & Co. Image courtesy of Wolfgang Sell of the National Stereoscopic Association.

Some have speculated that the photograph is by Arnold Genthe. But, Genthe wasn’t born until 1869, making him only 11 years old when Emperor Norton died in 1880 — and he didn’t arrive in San Francisco until 1895.

According to Sell: “The consensus was that it is an unpublished Houseworth, but no way to know for sure.”

That would be the studio of Thomas Houseworth & Co. Based on the other extant photographs of Emperor Norton, this one appears to be from the mid to late 1870s. The Houseworth studio did make at least three studio portraits of the Emperor during this period, including one with the same hat and the same pin-and-feather arrangement as he’s wearing here.

The fact that the labels are so minimal, not even mentioning the lead actor in the scene, and that they are handwritten — rather than being typeset and printed, and including studio and copyright information, as a published card of this sort would have been — lends credence to the theory that this card was never published.

Also, Sell notes: “There are many walking ‘ghosts’ in the image, [the photographer/studio] may not have liked that.”

Although the photograph is of a street scene — the only known photo of Emperor Norton in a naturalistic setting — it’s not entirely candid. The Emperor appears to be looking directly at the camera, having been asked by the photographer to stand still for a moment.

Other distinctives: This appears to be the only photograph we have of Emperor Norton standing full-front with his arms relaxed at his side. Other standing photos show him in three-quarter view or in a sword-drawing pose, or both.

Also, this is only the second photograph that shows the full length of the Emperor’s favorite walking stick, a gift from subjects in Portland, Ore., that newspapers dubbed the Serpent Scepter.

Here’s a detail from the highest-quality image of this wonderful trace of the Emperor, peering at us through time.

Your Majesty, we salute you.

Detail from stereocard of Emperor Norton on Chinatown Street, 1870s (left photograph). Possibly taken by the studio of Thomas Houseworth & Co. Original image courtesy of Wolfgang Sell of the National Stereoscopic Association.

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UPDATE — 6 October 2022

Thanks to Doug Chan, we now know exactly where Emperor Norton is standing in this stereoview.

Chan produces a “blog” — more of a journal, really — called Through a Chinese American Lens, where he documents and discusses pre-1906 photographs of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

In Chinatown, immediately to the northwest of Portsmouth Square — and about a 3-block walk from where Emperor Norton lived on Commercial Street between Montgomery and Kearny — there is a narrow north-south lane linking Washington Street to the south and Jackson Street to the north.

Today, this lane is called Wentworth Place. In the Emperor’s day, it was known as Washington Place and — more popularly — Fish Alley.

In two pieces — “Emperor Norton: peculiar and improbable advocate for Chinese Americans” (October 2021) and the richly illustrated “Washington Place: Chinatown’s ‘Fish Alley’” (October 2022)…

Chan establishes that Emperor Norton is standing at the southern end of Fish Alley, near Washington Street.

We’ve been hoping to be able to add a pin for this to The Emperor Norton Trust’s interactive, annotated Emperor Norton Map of the World. With this discovery, we have!

Find the pin here — and, click on the pin for information and links.

Thank you, Doug!

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