In 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?
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In 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.
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Today, 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.
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At 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.
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This 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.
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On 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.
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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.
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The 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.
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For 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.
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On 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!
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Arriving 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.
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While 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.
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The Emperor's Bridge Campaign proposes that the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge be additionally named for Emperor Norton in 2022 — the 150th anniversary of when Emperor Norton set out the original vision for the Bay Bridge in 1872. On 10 May 2016, Campaign president John Lumea sent to Campaign supporters and followers a letter outlining the bridge-naming proposal and options for pushing it forward.
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In the mid 1880s, a Canadian illustrator and writer named Palmer Cox, then living in New York, started make a name for himself with a children's comic series that followed the exploits of fairy-like creatures called Brownies. But when Cox published his first book, in 1874, he was nearing the end of a 12-year stint in San Francisco. The book, a diary collection of Twain-like comic sketches, included Cox's endearing illustration of one of the city's most famous citizens.
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Ever the "union man," Emperor Norton was as ecumenical in matters of politics as he was in matters of religion.
In a cameo appearance on the front page of the 21 February 1861 edition of the Daily Alta California newspaper, the Emperor needed only five crisp words to pin his pro-Union colors unmistakably to the mast.
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To celebrate the advent of the bike craze in San Francisco, as memorialized by Eadweard Muybridge's iconic 1869 photograph of Emperor Norton on a bone-shaker, The Emperor's Bridge Campaign is delighted to be partnering with SF Tweed and San Francisco Steampunks to present a May Day bike ride ending with a picnic at Marina Green. Our friends from the Mechanics' Institute also will be joining us. Details on the flip!
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In July 1869, Emperor Norton issued a Proclamation urging his subjects to do everything in their power to advance the steam-powered airship experiments of Frederick Marriott. Six years later, in 1875, Marriott published a beautiful map of San Francisco.
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At the recent San Francisco History Days fair at the city's landmark Old Mint building, Stephen Parr of the San Francisco Media Archive and Oddball Films screened a rarity from the Oddball archive — a 1947 film short titled Emperor Norton, from the Academic Film Company.
In fact, Emperor Norton is a retitled reissue of the film The Story of Norton I, made by Columbia Pictures in 1936. This may be the earliest film portrayal of the Emperor.
We haven't yet connected all the dots. But the picture of this film is much clearer than it was. It's a fascinating story.
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One of the most iconic images of Emperor Norton is an 1869 photo, taken by the pioneering photographer and inventor Eadweard Muybridge, of the Emperor astride a "velocipede," the contraption — newfangled at the time — that we know as the bicycle.
To celebrate this famous photograph, The Emperor's Bridge Campaign is partnering with the Mechanics' Institute, SF Tweed and San Francisco Steampunks to present a "couplet" of events: a free lecture at the Mechanics' Institute on Wednesday 20 April and The Emperor's Ride — a bike ride and picnic on May Day.
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For nearly 50 years, Allen Stanley Lane's 1939 biography of Emperor Norton was recognized as the standard reference on the subject. But, as often as Lane is cited in Norton studies and within "the Norton community" more generally, it appears that there is no online record of Lane — apart from references to the fact that he wrote his book.
There appears to be no mention of Lane's personal life — or of anything else he might have written or produced about Emperor Norton.
So it's been gratifying, over the last couple weeks, to have been "gifted" with a couple more documentary signs of Lane's existence.
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