Emperor Norton in Mourning

January 08, 2026 / John Lumea

In Victorian-era Britain and the United States, the mourning of a loved one or public figure was guided by an elaborate set of rituals and customs.

Among these: A man in mourning wore a black armband on his upper left arm. This could be a properly sewn and hemmed item — whether “homemade” or professionally manufactured — or, more simply, a hand-tied strip of black crape.

Often on this date — the anniversary of Emperor Norton’s death on 8 January 1880 — we at The Emperor Norton Trust have highlighted a particular late-1870s photograph of the Emperor, in profile, as the photo carries a certain funereal aspect.

Innumerable times over the last 12½ years, we have looked at this and another photograph of Emperor Norton from the same sitting without noticing that the Emperor is wearing a black mourning band in both photos.

As we don’t find this photographic detail documented anywhere, it stands to reason that no one else has noticed it either.

A little digging reveals who, most likely, the Emperor was mourning.

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categories / Research, Original sources
tags / photograph, Victorian, death, mourning, custom, etiquette, armband, crape, crepe, Mercedes of Orléans, Spain, Queen, Queen Consort, Bradley & Rulofson, San Francisco Chronicle, 1878

Is the Clock Tower of the San Francisco Ferry Building Based on the Bell Tower of a Cathedral in Spain?

November 15, 2022 / John Lumea

In connection with The Emperor Norton Trust’s recent proposal that the San Francisco Ferry Building’s clock tower be named “The Emperor Norton Tower” next year — the 125th anniversary of the Ferry Building — we’ve been doing some additional research into the design and construction of the building and its tower.

The Ferry Building opened in 1898, and one of the chestnuts that has been repeated about the building for most of its lifetime — increasingly so in the period after World War II — is the claim that the design of the clock tower is “based on” — or “modeled after” — or “patterned after” the 12th-century bell tower, known as La Giralda, of the Seville Cathedral in Spain.

Some commentators have gone so far as to say that the Ferry Building clock tower is a “replica” of the Giralda.

But, the historical and visual record reveals the Ferry Building tower’s architectural debt to the Giralda to be significantly less than these unqualified claims suggest.

Read on for a well-documented, highly illustrated deep-dive.

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categories / Research, Places, Original sources
tags / Ferry Building, clock tower, Giralda, Seville, Spain, Arthur Page Brown, A. Page Brown, Herman Scheffauer, Madison Square Garden, Stanford White, McKim Mead and White, medieval, Moorish, Beaux-Arts, The Argonaut, Town Talk, London Daily Express, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Call, New York Sun, Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board, 1198, 1568, 1890, 1891, 1893, 1895, 1898, 1903, 1905, 1906, 1977

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Emperor Norton in Mourning

Is the Clock Tower of the San Francisco Ferry Building Based on the Bell Tower of a Cathedral in Spain?