RECENT RESEARCH — A newly unearthed photograph showing the north side of the 600 block of Commercial Street, San Francisco, in the aftermath of the earthquake and fires of 1906 reveals, for the first time, visual evidence of the fate of the building that housed the Eureka Lodgings, where Emperor Norton lived from 1864–65 until his death in 1880. Our analysis of the photo sharpens the focus on the identities and locations of the buildings along this stretch — and exactly what each building suffered in 1906. Includes our highly researched new infographic that can be used as a tool for understanding the history of this location.

The Emperor Norton Trust

TO HONOR THE LIFE + ADVANCE THE LEGACY OF JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON

RESEARCH • EDUCATION • ADVOCACY

Filtering by Tag: San Francisco Call

Emperor Norton as an Artist’s Model

April 26, 2023  /  John Lumea

Addie Ballou is best known now — where she is known at all — as a women’s suffrage crusader, a rather bad poet, and a (probably overconfident) lecturer on any of the subjects she was game to talk about for an hour to any group who asked, provided they had a room and a podium.

But, Ballou also had a brief career as a minimally trained portrait artist.

A certain conventional wisdom holds that, in 1877, Emperor Norton sat for a portrait painted by Ballou — and that this is the only such portrait the Emperor ever sat for during his lifetime.

As ever with Emperor Norton, though, a look under the hood reveals that things probably are not quite as we’ve been led to believe.

Read on for some newly uncovered details about old art associations.

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categories / Research, Tributes, Original sources
tags / Art, portrait, painting, sitting, Addie Ballou, Oscar Kunath, Virgil Williams, Alice Brown Chittenden, San Francisco Call, Ward Ritchie Press, San Francisco Art Association, California School of Design, Mechanics' Fair, Mechanics' Pavilion, Bradley & Rulofson, Society of California Pioneers, 1873, 1874, 1877, 1878, 1879

Is the Clock Tower of the San Francisco Ferry Building Based on the Bell Tower of a Cathedral in Spain?

November 15, 2022  /  John Lumea

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.

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categories / Research, Places, Original sources
tags / Ferry Building, clock tower, Giralda, Seville, Spain, Arthur Page Brown, A. Page Brown, Herman Scheffauer, Madison Square Garden, Stanford White, McKim Mead and White, medieval, Moorish, Beaux-Arts, The Argonaut, Town Talk, London Daily Express, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Call, New York Sun, Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board, 1198, 1568, 1890, 1891, 1893, 1895, 1898, 1903, 1905, 1906, 1977

Emperor Norton, Friend of Immigrants

March 13, 2019  /  John Lumea

In April 1875, Emperor Norton issued one of his most important Proclamations on the welcome, sympathy, assistance, protection and care of immigrants.

Thirty years later, in September 1908, this Proclamation was bumped to the top of the pile, when the Emperor’s portraitist Addie Ballou included it — unsourced — in a brief memoir of her experience of the Emperor that she wrote for the San Francisco Call.

Alas, the Proclamation has languished in unmentioned obscurity for most of the last 110 years — not least, because it has not been publicly sourced and documented as authentic.

This, we do here.

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categories / Original sources, Proclamations, Research
tags / immigration, immigrants, Pacific Appeal, Addie Ballou, San Francisco Call, Mechanics' Institute, Mechanics' Pavilion, Jonathan Robert Pamplin, 1875, 1908

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