You're on Commercial Street. In twenty twenty-three, the city added a second name to this block — Emperor Norton Place. There's nothing remarkable about the building at six twenty-four. It's a regular building on a regular block.
In the eighteen sixties, this address contained a room barely bigger than a closet — six feet by nine — rented for fifty cents a night. And the man who lived in it was the Emperor of the United States.
Joshua Abraham Norton. Born in England, raised in South Africa, arrived in San Francisco in the early eighteen fifties with about forty thousand dollars and a talent for business. He invested in real estate. Made a fortune — an estimated quarter of a million dollars. Then, in eighteen fifty-two, he heard that China had banned rice exports. Rice prices in San Francisco spiked from four cents a pound to thirty-six cents. Norton saw his chance. He bought an entire shipment — two hundred thousand pounds of Peruvian rice — for twenty-five thousand dollars, planning
to corner the market.
Then several more ships full of cheap rice arrived. The price collapsed to three cents a pound. Norton sued. Lost. The California Supreme Court ruled against him. Foreclosure on everything. Bankruptcy by eighteen fifty-six. He disappeared from public life for three years.
And then, on September seventeenth, eighteen fifty-nine, he walked into the offices of the San Francis
