TO HONOR THE LIFE + ADVANCE THE LEGACY OF JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON
RESEARCH • EDUCATION • ADVOCACY
The songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb are best known for their smash musicals Cabaret and Chicago. But Kander and Ebb's first musical theater collaboration was on the 1962 score for an unproduced musical inspired, in part, by the story of Emperor Norton. The score includes a Happy New Year song. Step inside for a listen, as rendered by Kander and Ebb themselves!
Read MoreNew Campaign research seems to confirm that a photograph sometimes thought to be of a young Emperor Norton is not the Emperor but just a boy with a military costume and a fake beard.
Read More
New cover page for The Emperor's Bridge Campaign's project to name the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge for Emperor Norton. Click above to go to the page. Background photograph © 2015 Jeru Banez.
Introducing a new cover page, a new navigational menu and a new URL to get you more quickly to information about The Emperor's Bridge Campaign's project seeking state legislation to name the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge for Emperor Norton — or, more accurately, to add a name like "Emperor Norton Bridge" — by 2022, the 150th anniversary of the Emperor's proclamations setting out the original vision for the bridge in 1872.
Read More
:: :: ::
For an archive of all of the Trust’s blog posts and a complete listing of search tags, please click here.
Search our blog...
View from the mezzanine as guests arrive for the First Annual Tannenbaum Toast at The House of Shields, San Francisco, in December 2013.
The annual holiday party of The Emperor's Bridge Campaign celebrates the legend that it was Emperor Norton who originally called for the raising of a great tree in Union Square every Yuletide season. By tradition, the celebration takes place on the second Sunday of December in the mezzanine of the historic House of Shields bar in San Francisco, where we'll gather for the fourth time on Sunday 11 December from 4 to 6 p.m.
Read MoreIn 1918, author and literary anthologist Ella Sterling Cummins Mighels (1853-1934) recalled her childhood memory of Emperor Norton and recounted the special Decoration Day tribute that was repaid him five years earlier.
Read More
The Emperor Norton Bridge a.k.a. the Bay Bridge, in San Francisco, as seen from Rincon Park. In the foreground: Cupid's Span (2002), by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Photograph © 2007 Σταύρος.
On Saturday 12 November 2016, the Emperor Norton Bridge a.k.a. the Bay Bridge turns 80.
Please join The Emperor's Bridge Campaign for a celebration to wish the Emperor's bridge a happy birthday and to show your support for naming the bridge for Emperor Norton in 2022 — the 150th anniversary of the Emperor's proclamations in 1872 setting out the original vision for the bridge.
Read MoreThere is a proposal afoot to name the Sharon Meadow, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, for the late comedian and actor Robin Williams. The rationale being used strengthens the case for naming the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge for Emperor Norton.
Read MoreIn 1959, "the Society of California Pioneers in cooperation with the San Francisco Chronicle" proposed an Emperor Norton memorial plaque at the intersection of California Street and Grant Avenue — where the Emperor collapsed and died on 8 January 1880. A design for the plaque was created by Hubert Buel, the Chronicle's art director. Indeed, the design and text for the plaque were approved by resolution of the San Francisco Arts Commission on 1 June 1959.
And yet, today, there is no Emperor Norton plaque at California and Grant. In fact, it appears that the project never made it before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors — which typically would have to have given final approval for a project like this in order for it to move forward.
How did an Emperor Norton plaque with the collaborative backing of two storied institutions like the Society of California Pioneers and the San Francisco Chronicle get pushed off the tracks — and who did the job?
Read MoreIn 1926, San Francisco-born artist Charles William Saalburg penned an article for The New York Times, in which he recalled many of the storied figures that peopled the San Francisco of his younger years. The piece featured Saalburg's own illustrations of these characters, including an undated rendering of Emperor Norton, which he depicted — perhaps from childhood memory — as a Santa Claus figure with an admiral's hat.
Saalburg's illustration of the Emperor is included in the Paintings gallery of ARENA, the Campaign's digital Archive of Emperor Norton in Art, Music & Film.
Read MoreToday, in celebration of his 90th birthday, Tony Bennett was on hand in San Francisco to receive a well-deserved tribute: the unveiling of a larger-than-life statue of him in front of the Fairmont Hotel, where he made his San Francisco debut in 1954 — and where he introduced his immortal signature song, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," in 1961.
Bennett was given the tribute because — although he wasn't born in San Francisco, and although he never lived here — he was a true San Franciscan.
Emperor Norton is another gentleman who — like Tony Bennett — became a true San Franciscan by loving the city and being loved in return.
It is long past time for Emperor Norton to be honored with a tribute that rises to the level. A tribute that recognizes the Emperor for setting out the original vision for the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and for being one of the earliest champions of the values of openness, tolerance, fair play and the common good that came to be identified with San Francisco, Oakland and the Bay Area — and that celebrates him for doing all of this with the whimsical and irrepressible style that is the hallmark of his adopted city.
Read MoreAt a special event on Thursday 13 October, titled My Emperor, My Muse, The Emperor's Bridge Campaign will bring together an eclectic and interesting mix of people — artists who've created specific Emperor-themed works and others who have thought deeply about Emperor Norton — for a conversation about the Emperor's abiding cultural import as an avatar of whimsy, openness, tolerance and fair play.
We'll learn why Emperor Norton moves these people; how he has shaped their projects; why they think the Emperor remains a cultural touchstone; and the role that they think art can play in shaping and polishing the stone.
Read MoreThis year, we're marking Empire Day with a "double bill" of events on Saturday 17 September: an onsite Field Talk at 3 p.m. followed by a nearby brief Empire Day celebration at 4:30.
Read MoreOn Saturday 9 July 2016, the San Francisco History Association held its 18th Annual Awards Dinner at the San Francisco Italian Athletic Club on Washington Square. At the Dinner, the Association presented The Emperor's Bridge Campaign with its 2016 Ron Ross Founder's Award, which is "given each year to a person, group of people or organization for performing an impressive undertaking that support's San Francisco history."
What follows are the acceptance remarks offered at the Dinner by Campaign founder and president John Lumea.
Read More
Comic, 1871, by John Steinberg. The comic appeared in a late 1871 issue of Frederick Marriott's California Mail Bag magazine, as part of a group of Steinberg's "Humorous Sketches of the War in Amador." Source: Internet Archive.
Today, The Emperor's Bridge Campaign launches ARENA: Archive of Emperor Norton in Art, Music & Film. ARENA seeks to be a comprehensive, authoritative, searchable digital archive of representations and interpretations of Emperor Norton in the visual arts, in music and in film — the mediums that are most readily presented online. The Archive includes "renderings" of Emperor Norton from the early 1860s to the present.
Read MoreThe Emperor's Bridge Campaign is delighted and honored to announce that the San Francisco History Association has selected the Campaign to receive the Ron Ross Founder's Award for 2016.
Read MoreFor at least 40 years, it appears, the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company featured on the menu of its shops an Emperor Norton Sundae. Ghirardelli discontinued the Emperor Norton in 2004, possibly earlier — but, evidence of the Emperor remains in this little collection of Ghirardelli menus from the 1960s, '70s and '80s.
Read MoreOn Sunday 12 June 2016, Emperor Norton — played by Joseph Amster of Time Machine Tours — will lead a special "off the menu" historical walking tour focusing exclusively on Emperor Norton sites and stories.
The tour is a fundraising benefit for the Campaign. Please join us!
Read MoreArriving in San Francisco in 1858, Oscar Penn Fitzgerald (1829-1911) was the founder and sometime preacher at one of the churches that was on Emperor Norton's Sunday rotation. By the time he returned to his native South in 1878, Fitzgerald had become an influential leader in the development of higher education in California. They were twenty years that enabled Fitzgerald to witness firsthand nearly the whole of the Emperor's reign.
O.P. Fitzgerald's second book of "California Sketches," published in 1881, features one of the most carefully observed and wonderfully drawn portraits of Emperor Norton that we have — exploring, with great empathy, the paradox of an Emperor who carried a Bologna sausage in his hip pocket but whose nobility of mind and bearing were such as to rob his title of any paradox at all.
Read MoreWhile a student at the Savannah College of Art & Design (Atlanta campus), freelance cartoonist Rachel Ordway created a wonderful little 3-part morality tale in which Emperor Norton explains himself to a young kid.
Read More