Emperor Norton on the Crest of the Farmers Market Wave

February 24, 2024 / John Lumea

For many years, Italian produce farmers in San Francisco had set up a vegetable market on Sansome Street between Clay and Washington. But, in late 1873, things were coming to a head in a long-simmering public dispute about whether the market should be allowed to stay there — and, if not, where it should go.

In November 1873, Emperor Norton weighed in with a Proclamation calling for the market to be moved from Sansome, a public street, to a new purpose-created public square next door.

In effect, the Emperor was seeking to establish the farmers market as a public institution in San Francisco.

This is one of many reasons why the San Francisco Ferry Building clock tower — which rises above what today is the city’s flagship farmers market, at the Ferry Building — should be named EMPEROR NORTON TOWER.

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categories / Research, Original sources, Proclamations
tags / vegetable, produce, vegetable market, produce market, Italian, Sansome Street, Market Street, farmers market, public market, Daily Alta California, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, 1871, 1873, 1874

1870s Forecasts of a Market for Emperor Norton Photographs & Signatures

February 18, 2024 / John Lumea

In 1872 — two years before the first commercially retailed photographic portrait of Emperor Norton — an editor in Oakland wondered whether there might be a market for photographs of the Emperor and how much collectors might be willing to pay.

Five years later, in 1877, a San Francisco paper carried an editorial on the prices paid at a recent New York sale of autographs of U.S. presidents, European monarchs, and other notables. The writer observed that Emperor Norton's signatures were "going at a low rate" and suggested that this would remain the case with the Emperor’s ongoing sales of signed promissory notes continuing to glut the market — but that, in the future, the Emperor’s signature could become a more precious commodity.

In light of the four- and five-figure sums now commanded by photographs and signed promissory notes of Emperor Norton, it’s worth noting these two early — and, we believe, previously unreported — indicators that, even during the Emperor’s lifetime, there were those who saw that the Emperor eventually could find his way to the collector’s market.

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categories / Research, Original sources
tags / photograph, signature, autograph, currency, promissory note, market, collector, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Oakland Daily Transcript, Heritage Auctions, Bonhams, 1872, 1874, 1875, 1877

Emperor Norton Does Art Criticism With a Borrowed Jackknife — And the Crowd Loves It

December 28, 2023 / John Lumea

By 1861 — and for the 18-plus-year remainder of his reign — Emperor Norton was a favorite and enduring subject for San Francisco cartoonists and theater troupes, who found that local audiences enjoyed the good-natured lampooning of their Emperor.

The Emperor himself was less amused — and, there are a couple of oft-cited examples of the Emperor’s expressing his royal displeasure over how he was portrayed in these contexts.

Recently, we uncovered an “episode of displeasure” that is even better documented than the familiar examples.

The occasion was the mounting of an advertisement using Emperor Norton’s image on a construction fence at Montgomery and California Streets. The Emperor borrowed a jackknife; cut out the image of himself; and sliced the image to shreds.

The crowd, as they say, “went wild.”

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categories / Research, Places, Original sources, ARENA
tags / Art, cartoon, comic, caricature, photograph, theater, depiction, portrayal, Safe Deposit Building, Montgomery Street, California Street, advertisement, ad, George Frederick Keller, Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Jump, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, San Francisco Chronicle, Michael Reese, 1861, 1863, 1869, 1873, 1874, 1875

The Emperor Norton National Fame Accelerator of 1875

December 20, 2023 / John Lumea

Although national awareness of Emperor Norton did increase during the 20-year period of his reign — especially after 1870 — it remains the case the virtually all of the press mentions of the Emperor between his self-declaration in September 1859 and his death in January 1880 are from newspapers in California and Nevada.

It appears that fewer than 100 mentions of Emperor Norton during this 20-year period were published in papers outside these two states.

But, within this “national” group of papers outside California and Nevada…

Some 20–25% of the newspaper coverage of the Emperor can be attributed to reprints of an excerpt from a single article in 1875.

The article — written by a New York transplant and veteran editorial staffer of the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin who had arrived in San Francisco 10 years earlier — was published by New York-based Scribner’s Monthly.

The excerpt reached readers in 10 states.

Details and documentation inside.

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categories / Research, Original sources
tags / newspapers, media coverage, national, reputation, fame, Henry Whitney Bellows, Thomas Starr King, New York Christian Inquirer, Samuel Williams, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Scribner's Monthly, The New Era, reprint, 1864, 1875

The "Eyes of the Emperor" in 1879

March 20, 2023 / John Lumea

The Emperor Norton Trust previously has documented 16 Proclamations of Emperor Norton on various aspects of “the Chinese question” — the latest being published in April 1878, just 2½ weeks before the Emperor’s highly publicized sand-lot encounter that month with the anti-Chinese demagogue Denis Kearney.

But, we’ve discovered three new pieces of evidence, from 1879, indicating that — for nearly 2 years after his encounter with Kearny, and right up until his death in 1880 — the Emperor continued to make good on his 1873 pledge and warning that “the eyes of the Emperor will be upon anyone who shall council [sic] any outrage or wrong on the Chinese” [emphasis in the original].

This evidence includes:

a second encounter between Emperor Norton and Denis Kearny, in January 1879, in which Kearney snarkily addressed the Emperor from his sand-lot platform;
an anti-Kearney public comment by the Emperor on the same day, at one of the freethinking, reform-minded discussion forums he regularly attended — a discovery that provides an opportunity to add a pin to the Trust’s interactive Emperor Norton Map of the World; and
a September 1879 editorial comment in the Sacramento Daily Bee, bearing witness to the Emperor’s ongoing reputation as what the Bee disparagingly called “Protector of China”

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categories / Research, Places, Proclamations, Original sources
tags / Chinese, China, Denis Kearney, Workingmen's Party of California, sandlot, sand lot, Theanthropic Society, David Hewes Building, Grand Central Hall, Sixth Street, Market Street, James C. McCue, Oakland Daily Radiator, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Daily Bee, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Daily Alta California, New York Christian Inquirer, Oroville Daily Mercury, 1867, 1868, 1865, 1870, 1873, 1878, 1879, 1880

Joshua Norton at the Transamerica Pyramid

December 14, 2022 / John Lumea

For some 35 years, students of the Emperor Norton story have followed William Drury’s account, in his 1986 biography of the Emperor, of the events surrounding Joshua Norton’s declaration of himself as Emperor on 17 September 1859.

According to Drury: George Fitch was editor of the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin on that day. Fitch’s office was in an upstairs room at 517 Clay Street. Joshua Norton marched his Proclamation into Fitch’s office that morning, and Fitch published it that afternoon.

But, that’s not how it went.

The Bulletin didn’t have an outpost on Clay Street until 1861. In 1859, the paper’s only offices were on Montgomery Street — on a site now occupied by the Transamerica pyramid.

And: Although George Fitch was a partner at the Bulletin in September 1859, he didn’t emerge as “the editor” — as the one with the power to decide what would and would not be published in the paper — until later.

That power resided with the person who actually was the editor on the day Joshua Norton appeared: James W. Simonton.

Read on for another course correction from The Emperor Norton Trust.

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categories / Research, Proclamations, Places, Original sources
tags / Joshua Norton, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Montgomery Street, Merchant Street, Montgomery Block, 517 Clay Street, Christian O. Gerberding, C.O. Gerberding, James King of William, Thomas Sim King, Thomas S. King, James W. Simonton, George Kenyon Fitch, George K. Fitch, George Fitch, William Drury, Transamerica Pyramid, 1855, 1856, 1859, 1860, 1861

The Mixed Economy of the Eureka Lodgings Building of Commercial Street

October 28, 2022 / John Lumea

When one reads that Emperor Norton lived in "the Eureka Lodgings" at "624 Commercial Street," it's tempting to imagine that the Eureka was in a building with one address and one use — and that the Eureka was it.

In fact: There were two buildings on the Eureka site between c.1850 and Emperor Norton's death in 1880, with the Eureka building arriving in 1857. Both buildings had three addresses and a variety of business tenants — with the second of the two buildings hosting the Eureka and two previous hotel/lodging establishments that each occupied only a portion of the top two floors.

At various times during the 1860s ― including while the Emperor was living here between 1864/65 and 1880 — the second building was home to some of the best-known and -respected businesses in early San Francisco history.

Both of the buildings on the Eureka site were located between Montgomery and Kearny Streets, with frontages on both Commercial and Clay Streets.

What follows is, we believe, the first published attempt to establish a "tenant timeline" of the Commercial Street frontages of these buildings between c.1850 and 1880.

Read on for some fascinating history — and some terrific advertisements!

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categories / Research, Places, Original sources
tags / Commercial Street, Montgomery Street, Kearny Street, Eureka Lodgings, Arcade, Arcade Saloon, Hotel Richelieu, Benton House, Aaron Babcock, David Hutchinson, John Cabaniss, A.C. Gamble, Pierre Trapet, Felix Hanlon, Meussdorffer, hatter, Lawrence & Houseworth, John W. Cherry, Contra Costa Laundry, Kohler Chase & Co., directories, advertising, advertisement, Daily Alta California, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, San Francisco Daily Herald, 154 Commercial, 156 Commercial, 158 Commercial, 624 Commercial, 626 Commercial, 628 Commercial, 1851, 1852, 1853, 1854, 1855, 1856, 1857, 1858, 1859, 1860, 1861, 1864, 1865, 635 Commercial, 637 Commercial, 175 Clay, 177 Clay, 637 Clay

"Be Nortonian" on Empire Day 2022

September 10, 2022 / John Lumea

An invitation and a challenge for Empire Day 2022 — the 163rd anniversary of Joshua Norton’s declaration of himself as Norton I, Emperor of the United States, on 17 September 1859.

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categories / Events, Legacy, Tributes
tags / Empire Day, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Montgomery Street, anniversary, 1859

“A New State of Things?” A Pre-Imperial Proclamation from Joshua Norton in July 1859

March 08, 2022 / John Lumea

On 5 July 1859, Joshua Norton took out a paid ad in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. The ad was a brief “Manifesto” addressed to the “Citizens of the Union.” It outlined in the broadest terms the national crisis as he saw it and suggested the imperative for action to address this crisis at the most basic level.

This was a little more than two months before Joshua issued his Proclamation — published in the same paper — declaring himself Emperor of the United States on 17 September 1859.

Together with what we already knew — that Joshua Norton continued to run business ads for nearly a year after his insolvency of August 1856; that the San Francisco directories of 1858 and possibly 1859 included listings for him...

The Manifesto is one of three additional pieces of evidence that Joshua Norton remained on the scene — and in San Francisco — in the period between his insolvency and his installation as Emperor.

One of these three traces is an historical “rescue” — reported by Allen Stanley Lane in his 1939 biography of Emperor Norton but apparently forgotten and possibly never documented before now.

The other two — including the Manifesto — are, we believe, discovered, documented and published here for the first time.

This new information should put to rest the conventional wisdom that Joshua Norton "disappeared" for X number of years only to "reemerge" fully transformed on a beatific day in September 1859.

No, there was a process and a path from fall to rise — from Point A to B.

These are three more of that path's public signposts.

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categories / Research, Original sources, Proclamations
tags / manifesto, advertisement, ad, candidate, candidacy, Congress, independent, tax collector, Democratic Party, jury, juror, I. Ferris Waldron, Wells Fargo, directory, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, 1855, 1857, 1858, 1859

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