TO HONOR THE LIFE + ADVANCE THE LEGACY OF JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON
RESEARCH • EDUCATION • ADVOCACY
In the late nineteenth century, the popular amusement resort known as Woodward's Gardens — located in the area that now is San Francisco's Mission District — had what has been called the West Coast's largest rollerskating rink. In March 1872, Emperor Norton tried to go for a skate there. The Emperor was turned away. He was not happy.
Read MoreA Proclamation of Thanks to all those who pledged to the summer 2015 Kickstarter for the limited edition t-shirt to inaugurate the Campaign's series of Sartorial Public Service Announcements.
Read MoreThe Emperor's Bridge Campaign is delighted to announce the appointment of John Law to join us as our newest Advisor.
Read MoreWhen we tried to establish the authenticity of an unsourced "Norton I" signature, we found the source — and a whole lot more.
Read MoreThe Emperor's Bridge Campaign is pleased to announce that the nonprofit San Francisco History Association, as part of its Research Gift program, recently awarded the Campaign with a lead grant to develop and publish a book of selected Proclamations of Emperor Norton.
Read MoreA 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.
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