The San Francisco Examiner's 9 January 1880 obituary of Emperor Norton noted that "[h]is living was very inexpensive. He occupied a cheap room and boarded at cheap restaurants."
We recently discovered two sources that point to what appears to be a generations-forgotten association of the Emperor with such a spot: his breakfast patronage of Sorbier's Restaurant, on Commercial Street, less than a block from his own residence on Commercial.
Both sources are written by people who were in San Francisco during Emperor Norton's lifetime: The first is the Japan Weekly Mail's February 1880 obituary of the Emperor — the second, an article of reminiscences published in a San Francisco-based scientific journal in May 1910.
Read on for the full story.
Read More
Two things that have been on The Emperor Norton Trust’s radar for some time…
…don’t make the shortlist of highlights in most tellings of the Norton story.
It turns out that these are part of a larger focus on railroad safety that Emperor Norton had added to his portfolio of concerns by 1869 — the year of a Proclamation we discovered recently that we believe is previously unreported.
We document and provide context for the 1869 Proclamation here.
Also included is documentation of two other of our recent discoveries:
the first news report of Emperor Norton’s railroad switch invention, published in Mining and Scientific Press, a serious and well-respected San Francisco journal of technology-focused industry news, and
the second news report of the invention, which appeared in a Brooklyn, Calif., newspaper the day before the Pacific Appeal — the Emperor’s imperial gazette — published his own Proclamation about it.
Read More