TO HONOR THE LIFE + ADVANCE THE LEGACY OF JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON
RESEARCH • EDUCATION • ADVOCACY
In July 1869, Emperor Norton issued a Proclamation urging his subjects to do everything in their power to advance the steam-powered airship experiments of Frederick Marriott. Six years later, in 1875, Marriott published a beautiful map of San Francisco.
Read MoreEmperor Norton was a favorite subject of a number of celebrity portrait photography studios that came to prominence in San Francisco during his reign. The Emperor is most closely associated with the studio of Bradley & Rulofson; and he was included in the studio's Celebrity Catalogue, which clients used to order prints of photographs produced by the studio. The Catalogue was a kind of index of the social stratification of the day — and offers a window into the Emperor's place in the social structure.
Read MoreThe Emperor outlines his immigration policy in this timely Proclamation, published in the Pacific Appeal newspaper on 24 April 1875.
Read MoreIn the late nineteenth century, the popular amusement resort known as Woodward's Gardens — located in the area that now is San Francisco's Mission District — had what has been called the West Coast's largest rollerskating rink. In March 1872, Emperor Norton tried to go for a skate there. The Emperor was turned away. He was not happy.
Read MoreWhen we tried to establish the authenticity of an unsourced "Norton I" signature, we found the source — and a whole lot more.
Read MoreIn the current San Francisco mayoral election, one of the challengers to sitting mayor Ed Lee has offered an anti-corruption plan that includes a proposal that San Francisco create a new elected office for a Public Advocate.
Other major cities already have Public Advocates; the level of authority depends on the city.
But the general idea is that the Public Advocate is a kind of official watchdog — someone who helps to ensure that the citizens are being treated fairly; that government agencies and private companies are properly maintaining basic utilities and services like streets, public transit, water, electricity and gas (and not gouging the people in the process); and that corruption that affects the general populace is called out wherever it is found.
Sound familiar? It should.
The original Public Advocate is Emperor Norton.
Three intriguing photographs of Emperor Norton taken by the studio of Thomas Houseworth & Co. in the 1870s show the evolution of the Emperor's style.
Read MoreOne of the most arresting and enigmatic images of Emperor Norton is an 1870s watercolor of him — in street clothes and smoking a pipe — that hung for more than 30 years in the library of the Bohemian Club, in San Francisco. No doubt known by the Emperor himself during his lifetime, this painting later made its way into the Overland Monthly — thanks, in part, to a member of Robert Louis Stevenson's extended family.
Here's the story of this wonderful portrait.
Read MoreFor all the hundreds of times that we've done a Google image search on "Emperor Norton" here at The Emperor's Bridge Campaign, the Internet still has gifts and surprises for us. Yesterday, it was the following image of a "cabinet card" of the Emperor dated c.1878 and credited to the studio of Bradley & Rulofson, which took many of the most famous photographs of Emperor Norton. We'd never seen this one.
Read More"As everyone knows, the Emperor Norton I. visits this city every Monday." So wrote the Oakland Tribune newspaper on 30 December 1879, a little more than a week before the Emperor died on 8 January 1880.
Although Emperor Norton often is pigeonholed as a creature of San Francisco, the truth is that he spent quite a bit of time visiting places that were outside the seat of his Empire. Here's a look at two of those places — Oakland and the adjacent Brooklyn, Calif. — as well as two of the Emperor's proclamations that were datelined "Brooklyn."
Images include: the original Oakland Tribune item; archival 1850s-'70s maps of Oakland, Brooklyn and Alameda; and two "Brooklyn proclamations" of 1872. Bonus: The story of The Tom Collins Hoax of 1874.
Read MoreThe story of those who stood by Emperor Norton at his death in 1880 — and two prominent organizations that did not, when the Emperor was reburied in 1934. Includes images of original archival documents published for the first time.
Read MoreIt long has been known that, upon Emperor Norton's death in January 1880, many of his personal effects — including his regimentals, a hat, his sword and his treasured Serpent Scepter, an elaborate walking stick given him by his subjects in Oregon — went to the Society of California Pioneers (only to be lost 26 years later in the earthquake and fire).
Many, but not all. This week, we discovered archival traces of an early 1880 donation to the Odd Fellows' Library Association of San Francisco. The donation — by David Hutchinson, Emperor Norton's longtime landlord at the Eureka Lodgings — included the stamp the Emperor used to place his seal on his proclamations. It might also have included the Emperor's final proclamation: written and sealed, but not yet delivered and published.
Read MoreA remarkable 1868 photograph of a San Francisco street scene that would have been very familiar to Emperor Norton.
Read MoreThis day in 1863 saw the auction of the furnishings and other contents of the Metropolitan Hotel at the southwest corner of Sansome and Bush Streets, in San Francisco. Emperor Norton had lived here for the past two years. A year or two later — between late summer 1864 and late summer 1865 — the Emperor began living at his best-known residence: the Eureka Lodgings, at 624 Commercial Street. Almost certainly, it was the closing of the Metropolitan that prompted the move towards Commercial Street. But this was not the first time Joshua Norton had lived at this corner.
Read MoreStarting sometime between summer 1864 and summer 1865, Emperor Norton occupied a sparsely furnished 9-by-6-foot room on the top floor of a 50-cent-per-night three-story boarding house known as the Eureka Lodgings. A little more than a decade earlier, the pre-imperial Joshua Norton enjoyed accommodation in one of the best hotels in San Francisco. What's surprising is that the difference between the daily rates of the two places appears to have been only about 50 cents.
Read MoreEmperor Norton's biographer, William Drury, maintains that "February 4th" had nothing at all to do with "His Majesty's Birthday." But was Drury right?
Read MoreJohn Tenniel's (1820-1914) illustration for the story of the Lion and the Unicorn, from Lewis Carroll's (1832-1898) novel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871).
Was Emperor Norton really born in 1819, as his gravestone says? Or was he born in 1818? At the next event of The Emperor's Bridge Campaign, we'll shed new light on the answer to this old question.
Read MoreHere's how Emperor Norton wished his subjects a Happy New Year one-hundred forty years ago today — on 2 January 1875.
Read MoreBuilding on Campaign board member Joseph Amster's recent "rediscovery" of am 1865 newspaper item pointing to an 1818 birth date for Emperor Norton, Campaign founder John Lumea examines Robert Ernest Cowan's influential 1923 essay about the Emperor and finds that Cowan manipulated the same news item to make it appear to support his own theory that Emperor Norton was born in 1819.
Read MoreIn 1820, 2-year-old Joshua Norton emigrated with his parents and older brother from England to South Africa. They and the 4,000 others who participated in this colonization scheme came to be known as the 1820 Settlers. This week, in response to Board member Joseph Amster's recent "rediscovery" of an 1865 newspaper item pointing to an 1818 birth date for Joshua Norton, the leading historical and genealogical Web site documenting the story of the 1820 Settlers movement updated its birth date for Emperor Norton.
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