The SRO Where the Emperor Lived Was Destroyed in the Earthquake & Fires of 1906. By 1910, This Had Been Replaced By the Current 115-Year-Old SRO, Which Was Constructed to Roughly the Same Layout Spec — Including the Size of the Rooms

THE EUREKA LODGINGS, where Emperor Norton is documented to have lived from 1864–65 until his death in January 1880, was a rooming house that occupied the top two floors of a narrow 3-story building on Commercial Street, between Montgomery and Kearny Streets, in San Francisco.

This building, originally constructed around 1857, was destroyed in the earthquake and fires of April 1906.

Like the 4-story building that replaced it on the same lot, the Eureka building was a block wide, with frontage on both Commercial Street and Clay Street. Over time, the street-level frontages were home to range of retail stores, workshops, and restaurants — including hatters; tailors; shoemakers; sign makers; a purveyor of musical instruments; and an early location of one notable photography studio: Lawrence & Houseworth. (See my October 2022 article here.)

The replacement building still stands today. Here’s a satellite view, with the building outlined in orange (click to enlarge):

**Satellite view of Commercial and Clay Streets, San Francisco, between Montgomery and Kearny Streets**, with the 1910 building on the former site of Emperor Norton’s rooming house outlined in orange. Cropped and annotated by John Lumea. Image source: Google

Here’s the Commercial Street elevation of the replacement building:

**Street view of 650–654 Commercial Street, San Francisco.** Positioned and cropped by John Lumea. Image source: Google

Here’s the Clay Street elevation. Note the most prominently visible address: 657 Clay.

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BASED ON an article and a conceptual drawing that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle of 19 November 1910, it appears that the replacement building was under construction by the end of 1910 — and that Clay Street was conceived as the primary frontage.

The article highlighted real estate trends in anticipation of the Pan-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. According to the article, there was at the time

a tendency to erect lodging-houses downtown rather than loft buildings or business structures. The lodging-houses downtown are rented to advantage as soon as they are ready for tenants.
A typical building of this class is one which the Warbur Estate Company is about to erect on the south line of in Clay street, east of Kearny street, upon a lot 34:4 by 119 feet, extending back to Commercial street. This building will have two fronts and be four stories high, with a basement story. The ground floor will be arranged for four stores, two each being on Clay and Commercial streets. The Clay-street front will be finished in ornamental tile and cement plaster, while a plainer finish will be given the other front. The structure will be of re-enforced concrete. There will be ninety-slx rooms and an office and accessories in the building. E.G. Bolles and Albert Schroepfer are the architects.

“Ninety-six rooms.” We’ll return to this.

Here’s the drawing of the new building that accompanied the article:

By 1912, the building was using the address shown in the recent street view, above — 657 Clay — and was known as Clay House.

Here’s the listing in the San Francisco directory of 1912:

Listing for Clay House, 657 Clay Street, Crocker–Langley San Francisco Directory, 1912, p. 2004. Collection of the San Francisco Public Library. Source: Internet Archive

From the same year comes the following Help Wanted ad from a John Hinck living at Clay House.

**Help Wanted ad for “Woodchoppers,”** *San Francisco Examiner*, 5 November 1912, p. 19. Source: Newspapers.com

Around 1940, the SRO at 657 Clay was rebranded as the Clayton Hotel. This is reflected in the following listing for the Clayton Hotel in that year’s San Francisco House and Street Directory:

Listing for Clayton Hotel, 657 Clay Street, San Francisco House and Street Directory, 1940. Collection of the San Francisco Public Library. Source: Internet Archive

In 1981, the Chinatown Community Development Center purchased and rehabbed the Clayton Hotel building in what would become the first of many such affordable housing / displacement prevention projects taken on by CCDC — which continues to own and manage the Clayton Hotel as an SRO with street-level storefronts on Clay and Commercial Streets.

Today, the San Francisco Planning Department recognizes “Clayton Hotel” and “651–657 Clay Street” as the name and address of this building for historical preservation purposes.

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THE TERM “SINGLE-ROOM OCCUPANCY” and the abbreviation “SRO” were some 60 years and more from being coined when Emperor Norton was living at the Eureka Lodgings in the 1860s and ‘70s. But an SRO is what the Eureka was, even if the demographic mix of the Emperor’s neighbor-residents — the 1870 census recorded all white men in their 30s–50s, including two physicians; a grain broker; a post office clerk; a retail clerk; and three artisans and craftsmen — does not especially match our idea of the “typical” SRO resident today. (See my article of July 2021 here.)

One thing that most people know about SROs is that the rooms themselves can be quite small.

Newspaper reporters given access to the Emperor’s third-floor room at the Eureka in the immediate wake of his death estimated that the room was 5 or 6 feet wide and 9 or 10 feet long.

The San Francisco Chronicle called it “ten-by-six”:

**Excerpt from “Imperial Ashes: Decease of Norton I, Emperor of the United States,” obituary of Emperor Norton**, *San Francisco Chronicle*, 9 January 1880, p. 2. Source: Newspapers.com

The Sacramento Daily Record–Union guessed a little smaller, at “nine by five feet”:

**Excerpt from “Emperor Norton: His Sudden Death in San Francisco,” obituary of Emperor Norton**, *Sacramento Daily Record–Union*, 10 January 1880, p. 8. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

Presumably, the reporters providing these details had not been carrying tape measures. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that Emperor Norton’s room was close to the larger of the published dimensions: about 60 square feet, give or take. Subtracting the space needed to accommodate the room’s spare furnishings that were observed over the years — a rudimentary bed/cot, a wardrobe, a wooden chair, and a couple of small tables — plus another 7 or 8 square feet for the door to swing freely, and the room would have had little more than enough room for the Emperor to stand in one place and turn around: basically a walk-in closet.

The dimensions of rooms in the Clayton Hotel are only marginally larger. As we saw earlier, when the SRO was built in 1910 it had 96 rooms across 3 floors. One need only glance at the narrow width of this building to do the math and understand that individual rooms were tiny.

According to the San Francisco government housing portal’s page for the Clayton Hotel, there may now be fewer than 96 rooms. But, the room dimensions still are micro: 74 square feet — which probably is within the margin error for the size of Emperor Norton’s room in the Eureka Lodgings as guesstimated by the obituary reporters of January 1880.

For reference, here’s someone demonstrating the size of a room in the Clayton Hotel for a March 2022 San Francisco Chronicle article on Chinatown SROs:

**Photograph illustrating article, “A wave of SRO listings have [sic] set Chinatown on Edge,”** *San Francisco Chronicle*, 22 March 2022. Original caption: “Hazel Chen gestures as she describes the limited space at a vacant single room occupancy unit at the Clayton Hotel in the Chinatown neighborhood of San Francisco.” Photo: Stephen Lam/Chronicle. Source: San Francisco Chronicle

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LAZY HISTORY BUFFS who write based on what they’ve “always heard” but can’t be bothered to read the actual, you know, history, seem determined to characterize Emperor Norton as “homeless.” This is inaccurate. Thanks initially, in the 1860s, to the generosity of old friends, including Masonic brothers and former business associates, and later, in the 1870s, to his own ingenuity in selling promissory notes — a project that also was assisted by printers who were friends and sympathizers — the Emperor had a home; it was just very modest and small. (For an informative and insightful take on homelessness in San Francisco seen through the lens of the Emperor Norton story, see Darren Mckeeman’s March 2024 essay here.)

Of course, it is better for Emperor Norton — let’s say it, Joshua Norton, the gentleman who, notwithstanding his 20-year reign as Emperor, never was not the flesh-and-blood human being who was born in Deptford, England, in 1818; who grew up in South Africa; and who immigrated to San Francisco in 1849 — it is better for Joshua to have had the tiniest of rooms with a lockable door than for him to have been unhoused and on the streets.

BUT…

It probably is hard to overestimate the depressive effect that it must have had on Joshua’s psyche to live for 14 or 15 years in such a claustrophobic space — a space that was so out of tune with his own self-identity and aspirations — especially when he previously had tasted the fruit of being prosperous in San Francisco and living in the best hotels in the city.

No doubt, it was the inhospitality of his room that led Emperor Norton to spend most of his waking hours away from his room — in the streets, saloons, libraries, and lecture halls that were the urban stage sets against which the Emperor was able to become the character and the legend that inspires us today.

Still. It is a testament to Joshua Norton’s imagination and his greatness of spirit that he was able to live into — and to call out for others — including for us here 145 years later — a vision of the future that was so much larger than could be contained by the closet where he slept and the four walls that pressed in on him every night and morning for more than 14 years.

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The Emperor Norton Trust

Inside SRO Replacing the One That Housed Emperor Norton's Room, A Glimpse of How Cramped His Quarters Were

The SRO Where the Emperor Lived Was Destroyed in the Earthquake & Fires of 1906. By 1910, This Had Been Replaced By the Current 115-Year-Old SRO, Which Was Constructed to Roughly the Same Layout Spec — Including the Size of the Rooms