For many years, Italian produce farmers in San Francisco had set up a vegetable market on Sansome Street between Clay and Washington. But, in late 1873, things were coming to a head in a long-simmering public dispute about whether the market should be allowed to stay there — and, if not, where it should go.
In November 1873, Emperor Norton weighed in with a Proclamation calling for the market to be moved from Sansome, a public street, to a new purpose-created public square next door.
In effect, the Emperor was seeking to establish the farmers market as a public institution in San Francisco.
This is one of many reasons why the San Francisco Ferry Building clock tower — which rises above what today is the city’s flagship farmers market, at the Ferry Building — should be named EMPEROR NORTON TOWER.
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Conventional wisdom holds that, when Joshua Norton arrived in San Francisco, he immediately found a business partner and established Joshua Norton & Co. — and that this firm operated continuously until the legal and financial fallout from Joshua’s prolonged rice contract dispute left him deserted and on his own.
But, a close reading of the newspaper record indicates that, during his first 3½ years in San Francisco, Joshua Norton alternated between periods of working with a partner (“& Co.”) and working as a sole proprietor — and that there were three distinct business partnerships that operated under the name “Joshua Norton & Co.”
The primary 20th-century biographers of Emperor Norton identify Joshua’s first business partner as Peter Robertson. But, our recent discovery of details that apparently were missed by these authors suggests that Joshua and Peter did not meet until nearly a year into Joshua’s San Francisco sojourn — and that they met at a time when the “original” Joshua Norton & Co. already had disappeared from view and Joshua was once again working solo.
The circumstantial evidence points to Peter Robertson as the partner in the second Joshua Norton & Co — not the first.
Read on for the full story.
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Much of the relevant background is in the title.
The rare, fine-grained, wonderfully textured photograph, a stereoview, is by J.J. Reilly.
It's beautiful.
What's left is to get your bearings and see the view — which you can do by clicking below!
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In October 1854, the California Supreme Court upheld a lower-court ruling against Joshua Norton & Co. in Ruiz v. Norton — the famous “rice case.”
Details of the fallout from this ruling suggest that Joshua already was overextended and carrying heavy debt before the rice fiasco; that he was overinvested — and highly leveraged — in real estate; and that, in general, his wealth was much more fragile and precarious than often is supposed.
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Two of the most basic modern assumptions about the locations and business enterprises of Joshua Norton in 1852 San Francisco appear not to bear scrutiny.
The assumptions — that Joshua Norton held forth from facilities that he “built” on 3 of the 4 corners of Sansome and Jackson Streets, and that one of these facilities was a rice mill — were espoused and may, in part, have been created by Norton’s 1986 biographer, William Drury.
But, Drury’s claims were undocumented. A deep-dive into the documentary record points to a different picture.
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