Over the last 25 years or so, a consensus has emerged among those attuned to San Francisco history — and particularly among Nortonophiles — that the former site of the Eureka Lodgings — where Emperor Norton is documented to have lived between 1864 / 65 and his death in 1880 — is the privately owned public open space (POPOS) known as Empire Park, located at 642 Commercial Street between Montgomery and Kearny Streets.

That's been the consensus — but...

Our careful analysis of two key bodies of evidence...

1
photographs of this stretch of Commercial Street taken between 1877 and 1906, and

2
Sanborn fire insurance and official San Francisco block (property) maps from the generation or two before and after the earthquake and fires of 1906

...reveal the Empire Park designation to be mistaken.

The Eureka Lodgings was located on Commercial Street between Montgomery and Kearny — just not on that site.
 
Rather...

The Eureka was on the current site of the building at 650 / 652 Commercial — a modest 1910 residential / retail building situated one door to the west of the park.  

In this deeply researched and documented — and extensively illustrated — article, we provide:

1
A new location for the former site of the Eureka that better accords with the historical record.

2
Confirmation — for the first time, we believe — of the visual ID of the Eureka Lodgings building, using photographs from during and after Emperor Norton's lifetime.

Don’t miss the fabulous detail in these new hi-res scans from 1878 (Muybridge), c.1892–94 (Knight) and 1906 (Hecht) — worth the price of admission! 

Indeed, our friends at the San Francisco Public Library (Hecht) and OpenSFHistory / WNP (Knight) already have revised the previous dates of their respective photographs in response to our research.
 

::   ::   ::

There is poetry here.

Last March, the artist known as Misstencil (Instagram; Facebook) spray-painted onto the park-facing side of 650 / 652 Commercial her September 2021 stencil of Emperor Norton based on a c.1875 photograph of the Emperor by the Bradley & Rulofson studio.