TO HONOR THE LIFE + ADVANCE THE LEGACY OF JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON
RESEARCH • EDUCATION • ADVOCACY
A portion of remarks offered by Emperor's Bridge Campaign founder and president John Lumea at the Campaign's inaugural celebration of Empire Day in San Francisco's Redwood Park on 17 September 2015. The event was held to mark the 156th anniversary of Joshua Norton's declaration of himself as "Emperor of these United States" on 17 September 1859 and to welcome the 157th year of the Nortonian realm and reign.
Read MoreAn Empire Day meditation on one of least understood words of Emperor Norton's original Proclamation of 17 September 1859.
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.
The conventional wisdom is that Emperor Norton was solely a San Francisco figure — a creature of the streets, parks, libraries, lecture halls and newspapers of his adopted city. In fact, the Emperor was a very well-known presence in Oakland and Berkeley, as well, making weekly visits to both places — and sometimes staying for days or weeks at a time. Please join The Emperor's Bridge Campaign for a special event with local historian Richard Schwartz, exploring an overlooked — but important — part of the Emperor's story.
Read MoreThree intriguing photographs of Emperor Norton taken by the studio of Thomas Houseworth & Co. in the 1870s show the evolution of the Emperor's style.
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Cabinet card of Emperor Norton, c.1878, by Bradley & Rulofson. Collection of The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Join The Emperor's Bridge Campaign as we celebrate the foundation of Norton's Empire on 17 September 1859 and the continuation of that Empire into the present and the future — a borderless Empire of the heart open to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Please gather in Redwood Park, San Francisco — adjacent to the Transamerica Pyramid — on Thursday 17 September at 6 p.m. sharp.
We're calling it Empire Day — and we hope that this will mark the beginning of a new tradition.
Read MoreThe Wall Street Journal is up today with a front-page article that looks at the coalescence, in recent years, of something approaching a Bay Area "movement" to celebrate Emperor Norton. The Journal features The Emperor's Bridge Campaign in its profile, and writes that the Campaign brings together "the boldest efforts to honor the emperor."
Read MoreThe Emperor's Bridge Campaign is honored to announce that, on Sunday 6 September, our good friend Joseph Amster will be offering — as a fundraising benefit for the Campaign — a special edition of his regular Emperor Norton's Fantastic San Francisco Time Machine historical walking tour.
100% of all ticket sales for this event will go to The Emperor's Bridge Campaign.
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 MoreHerb Caen had his reason's for not liking "Frisco." But perhaps they had very little to do with Emperor Norton.
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 MoreEarly last month, we ran Eadweard Muybridge's wonderful exterior photograph of the 1866 building of the Mechanics' Institute, where Emperor Norton spent many afternoons, wrote many proclamations and played many games of chess. But the more elusive prize has been a photograph(s) of the building's interior — of the physical spaces that Emperor Norton himself inhabited on all those afternoons, so many years ago.
Happily, we now can close this gap.
Read MoreOf the hundreds of Norton-ish folks that we've met over the course of the last year or so, some of those who harbor the deepest fondness for Emperor Norton and his story identify with one of two groups: the Jewish community or numismatists, the latter being the proper term for historians of coin and currency.
Here's a little discovery that brings both groups together — and that advances the case for 1818 as the year of the Emperor's birth.
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 MoreOn a beautiful if blustery afternoon yesterday in Colma, about 40 friends of Emperor Norton gathered for the laying of a special historical plaque for the Emperor at Home of Peace — the cemetery of Congregation Emanu-El, where the Emperor attended synagogue every Saturday.
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The Emperor's Bridge Campaign is delighted to offer a very important — and very easy — way for those who believe in what we are doing to support the work of the Campaign. You now can make credit and debit card donations to the Campaign on our Web site.
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.
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Detail of 1866 photograph of the newly completed second synagogue building of Congregation Emanu-El, located on Sutter Street between Powell and Stockton in San Francisco. Emperor Norton attended services here every Saturday. After the interior of the building was destroyed by fire following the earthquake of 1906, the structure was rebuilt and continued to be used by the Congregation until the present third synagogue building was dedicated in 1926. Original photo: California Views Photo Archives.
Emperor Norton was an English Jew. In San Francisco, he attended synagogue services at Congregation Emanu-El every Saturday. But he was never given a Jewish funeral or burial.
Now — 135 years after his death in 1880 — those who admire and revere the Emperor have an opportunity to participate in an afternoon of activities — on Sunday 3 May 2015 — intended to help mend this historical tear in the fabric of the Emperor's story. The ceremonial highlight of the afternoon will be the laying of a special plaque for Emperor Norton at Home of Peace, Emanu-El's cemetery in nearby Colma, Calif.
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1838 marriage record of Philip Norton and Anne Mary Ogilvie. Philip (b.1820) was the younger brother of Emperor Norton (b.1818) — and is the great great great grandfather of Julie Driver, the Campaign's special Happy Hour guest at Comstock Saloon, San Francisco, on 29 April. Source: 1820Settlers.com.
The Emperor's Bridge Campaign invites you to a Happy Hour featuring Norton genealogist — and the Emperor's niece — Julie Driver.
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