The best-known vista of the 245-foot-tall clock tower of the San Francisco Ferry Building is from along Market Street, looking northeast.
The best-known street vista — but not the only one.
The clock tower also rises as the eastern visual terminus of Commercial Street.
On today’s Commercial Street, the tower is most readily seen from the 2-block stretch between Montgomery Street to the east and Grant Avenue to the west. This is the stretch adjacent to, and near, the former site of 624 Commercial between Montgomery and Kearny Streets — where Emperor Norton lived from 1864/65 until his death in 1880.
The view of the Ferry Building clock tower from here is one reason why The Emperor Norton Trust has proposal that the tower be named Emperor Norton Tower. You can read our proposal and commentaries by clicking the Learn More button at EmperorNortonTower.org.
Click through for a series of seven views of the clock tower photographed from the 7-block stretch of Commercial Street between Drumm Street and Grant Avenue during the first half of the tower’s 125-year life-so-far — the period between c.1900 and 1960.
Read More
Does the honorary naming of a block of street put to bed the entire 90-year-long civic naming enterprise on behalf of Emperor Norton?
Absolutely not!
Read More
A commentary advancing the case for naming the San Francisco Ferry Building clock tower the “Emperor Norton Tower” in 2023 — the 125th anniversary of the Ferry Building.
Read More
In connection with The Emperor Norton Trust’s recent proposal that the San Francisco Ferry Building’s clock tower be named “The Emperor Norton Tower” next year — the 125th anniversary of the Ferry Building — we’ve been doing some additional research into the design and construction of the building and its tower.
The Ferry Building opened in 1898, and one of the chestnuts that has been repeated about the building for most of its lifetime — increasingly so in the period after World War II — is the claim that the design of the clock tower is “based on” — or “modeled after” — or “patterned after” the 12th-century bell tower, known as La Giralda, of the Seville Cathedral in Spain.
Some commentators have gone so far as to say that the Ferry Building clock tower is a “replica” of the Giralda.
But, the historical and visual record reveals the Ferry Building tower’s architectural debt to the Giralda to be significantly less than these unqualified claims suggest.
Read on for a well-documented, highly illustrated deep-dive.
Read More