Emperor Norton at the Metropolitan Hotel
In the Daily Alta California of 1 April 1863: Auction-day ad for the "closing sale" of the contents of the Metropolitan Hotel. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection.
Exactly 152 years ago today, according to the Daily Alta California newspaper — on Wednesday 1 April 1863, at 11 a.m. — the firm of Dyer & Badger held an auction — a "closing sale" — of all the furnishings and contents of the Metropolitan Hotel at the southwest corner of Sansome and Bush Streets, in San Francisco.
Why does this matter, you ask? A little history...
Recently, we reviewed the story of the Rassette House, the first-class hotel — at the same corner of Sansome and Bush — where Joshua Norton lived in 1852 and 1853, at the height of his prosperity and influence. In June 1853, the Rassette burned to the ground. Four months later, the hotel re-opened on the same spot, in a new edifice that was even grander than the first.
By this time, however, Joshua Norton was well into the downward spiral of financial and personal losses triggered by his ill-fated rice contract of December 1852. His peripatetic series of living arrangements over the next several years — each "establishment" grittier than the last — reflected the new reality. The last San Francisco directory listing for "Norton Joshua," before he declared himself Emperor in September 1859, is in the 1858 directory, which has him living at a cheap rooming house at 255 Kearny. (A listing, in the 1859 directory, for a "Norton Jesse, mcht" at the same address is intriguing. There are no listings for any Jesse Norton in the years before or after that. Was this our Emperor-soon-to-be, flying under the radar?)
Engraving of the newly rebuilt Rassette House, in The Annals of San Francisco (1855). The original hotel, where Joshua Norton had lived in 1852 and 1853, was destroyed by fire in May 1853. In 1858, this new building began operating as the Metropolitan Hotel; Emperor Norton lived here in 1861 and 1862. Source: Making of America Digital Library.
The next time we see a listing for "Norton Joshua" is in the 1861 directory, where he is listed as living at the Metropolitan Hotel. In the 1862 directory, he still is at the Metropolitan, now — and for the first time — with the parenthetical honorific "(Emperor)."
Listing for Emperor Norton in the Langley's San Francisco directory of 1862. This was the earliest edition of the directory to list Joshua Norton as "Emperor." Source: Internet Archive.
It turns out that the Metropolitan Hotel was the second-generation Rassette House under new management, and with a new name. It seems that the hotel operated as the Rassette until early to mid 1858, when it became the Metropolitan. This ad from New Year's Day 1861 has a text dated June 1858 — two and a half years earlier:
Ad for the Metropolitan Hotel in the Mariposa Gazette of 1 January 1861. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection.
This August 1860 ad notes that the Metropolitan has been under new proprietorship for "over two years."
Ad for the Metropolitan Hotel in the Visalia Weekly Delta of 18 August 1860. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection.
By the time Emperor Norton got to the Metropolitan in 1861, alas, the hotel may already have gone to seed. The Emperor's biographer, William Drury, called it "shabby." Indeed, when the Metropolitan closed in 1863, it was torn down and replaced by yet another new hotel on the southwest corner of Sansome and Bush: the Cosmopolitan.
The Cosmopolitan Hotel, at the southwest corner of Sansome and Bush Streets, San Francisco, in 1866. The hotel opened in 1864 on the site of the original Rassette House, which burned down in 1853, and the second Rassette House (later the Metropolitan Hotel), which closed and was demolished in 1863. Source: James Smith, San Francisco's Lost Landmarks (Craven Street Books, 2005).
Still. It's both fascinating and poignant to learn that Joshua Norton, who lived at the elegant original Rassette House in 1852 and 1853, returned to the very same corner in 1861 and 1862 — this time, as the Emperor — to live in a latter-day version of the hotel's second building that, by the time he got there, had suffered a decline of its own.
It appears that Emperor Norton moved into his best-known residence — the Eureka Lodgings, at 624 Commercial Street — between late summer 1864 and late summer 1865.
Almost certainly, it was the closing of the Metropolitan that year — sealed by the auction of the building's contents on this day in 1863 — that prompted his search for new digs.
No fooling.
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