San Francisco’s Homeless History
Those of you who follow me may know about my historical fiction novel based on the events in San Francisco History. I’ve published the first book, which covers from November of 1849 until 1859. I’m in the middle of writing the second book. The Emperor Norton is a central character in these novels, and well he should be — he was here for everything in San Francisco up until 1880. The character of the Emperor and the character of San Francisco are intertwined, with consequences that reach forward into the present day to bite us on the collective ass. These are merely my own observations and I’m pretty sure people will disagree with me, but after studying the period of San Francisco’s formation it seems to me there are lessons to be both learned and unlearned.
The first civil disturbance in San Francisco history was in 1855, at the corner of Stockton and Green. This was a sandlot which took up half the block at the time. It was vacant for a very long time. The gold rush ended a few years earlier, and the homeless miners filled up every available space with tents for a few years. The vast majority of these miners were Mexicans, but all miners were accustomed to much harsher conditions than we have in San Francisco. This is a major reason we have a large population of homeless people, by the way — the weather is survivable year-round.
What changed in 1855 is what was called the “Greaser Act” — a state-passed anti-vagrancy law. The first part specifically defined a vagrant as unemployed persons, prostitutes, and drunkards. If you are unemployed, a sex worker, or just someone drunk and passed out then you go to jail for 90 days. The second part refers to “greasers” and specifies that Mexicans or Native Americans who are armed and presumably scary looking — and directs law enforcement to disarm them or jail them. Of course, everything in this law is applicable just if they catch you on the street. You are free to do all of these things if you have a home to go to. This is important later.
In the short term, however, this law was used to clear the lot at Stockton and Green in what is probably the first declared riot in San Francisco — the state militia was called out to quell it, and more than a few people died. The “Greaser Act” was the law of the land in San Francisco, and for a while it was good.
Then Emperor Norton happened.
In the first ten years of San Francisco, there was no real infrastructure for lunatics. The doctors were all private practice — one famous name in San Francisco history is Lillie Hitchcock Coit, whose father was one of the private doctors in San Francisco in the early 1850s and who grew rich off the stock tips of his patients. Dr. Hitchcock and his peers cost money, and Joshua Norton had none of his own since 1855. It came out later that his friend Joseph Eastland paid his bills, and this kept him above the law. But when he went mad and started parading around the streets a funny thing happened. A few similar characters joined him.
The first one was the Money King, an eccentric person who had more cash than he knew what to do with. He would offer loans to passersby in the street who would refuse his insane and eccentric terms. When refused, he would pull stunts like skipping $20 gold coins off the water of the bay and claiming he could do this all day as a brag. He was followed up by George Washington the 2nd, a man who looked exactly like George Washington or at least he dressed that way. Throughout the first decade of Norton’s madness, a parade of characters followed him that had their schticks to make money. One man, who went by Oofty Goofty, would let you beat him up for money. A dime for a punch or a slap, a quarter for a blow with a switch, and for fifty cents you could whack him with a baseball bat. Norton sold his banknotes and this is important later as well.
These were the street people of the 1860s in San Francisco, and life was pretty rough for them. As the Civil War dragged on, more and more veterans appeared on the streets and more of them had horrific, terrifying injuries. These injuries ranged from disfigurement to insanity. The horror of rich San Franciscans at having to see this culminated in San Francisco enacting the very first Ugly Law in the country in 1867.
“Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed to be an unsightly or disgusting object or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets, highways, thorough-fares or public places in the City or County of San Francisco, shall not therein or thereon expose himself or herself to public view. Any person who shall violate the provisions of this section shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor; and on conviction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding twenty-five dollars, by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding twenty-five days, or by both such fine and punishment.”
Other sections of the ugly law prohibited panhandling and could be broadly interpreted to cover insanity.
One of the things about the Emperor Norton story in my mind is how it SHOULD shape our modern attitudes toward the homeless or those who are unable to keep a home in our city. Despite the pretensions of being an Emperor, Norton lived in what could liberally be called an SRO for most of his life, paid for by his friend Eastland — who started PG&E by the way. Without this help, Norton would be on the street and in jail.
But there is a part of the Norton story that persists to this day, and that is the fact that Norton and his ilk were the first glimmerings of San Francisco’s tourist trade. Mark Twain wrote what could be argued is the first travelogue in his book “Roughing It”, and word quickly spread that people had to see the crazy people they had parading in the streets in San Francisco. A popular turn of phrase at the time was “seeing the elephant” — that is, to travel and spend a lot of money doing it, to see the sights in far-flung places. Many people went to San Francisco to “see the elephant”, and the term invariably came to mean to be let down upon arrival. San Francisco was a dirty, violent place in the 1860s, but that didn’t stop people from coming to see it.
In 1867, Norton was arrested before the ugly laws were ever enacted. The police at the time were understaffed on purpose, so a squad of citizens who were paid less but bribed more could take over duties in hotels and act as private security with official police badges. One of these “patrol specials” tried to get Norton on a vagrancy charge. The funny thing is that regular cops HATED the patrol specials, and knew the laws a lot better. The patrol special was a man named Armand Barbier, and the booking officer pointed out that Norton was not a vagrant because he had a key to a room and over $4 in cash on him. This was a normal amount of money to carry around at the time. Barbier countered that he was certainly mad, and demanded to charge him with that. And so he was until the police chief heard what had happened. I fictionalized an account of this episode in the latest chapter I wrote for my novel, America’s Last Emperor.
I believe that the life of Emperor Norton is a good metaphor for our current homeless problems. It provides a model for how we SHOULD treat our homeless. Give them a home — it’s as simple as that. We’re at a point in our discourse about homelessness where people with a lot more money than the homeless want to enact 21st-century Ugly Laws so they won’t have to see poor people. The homeless are our neighbors. Nothing embodies this so much as the case of Davinc, or “Q” as it seems most of the neighborhood knew them by. Davinc was my neighbor.
I was living on the Kearny Steps when it happened last year, in a video that went viral. In that video, Davinc got sprayed down by Shannon Collier Gwin of the Foster Gwin Gallary about three blocks from that apartment. I knew Davinc from the street corner. I walked past them every time I went to the corner store. I bought them things to eat. My girlfriend gave them some of my socks one time, I know because I found my socks all over the street one morning. When you live with unhoused neighbors, you try to help when you can and we did. We aren’t rich people. But Collier Gwin is rich — his ancestor is old California money, the first US senator from California, and one of those locked up by the post-1861 government for advocating for civil war. He should have gotten far more than a slap on the wrist for assault.
We currently have a class of people who are trying to replicate the virality of that moment with Davinc and they’ve attracted the oily, out-of-town grifters who came to see the elephant. It got started by people with money wanting to drive a certain narrative, and they got latched onto by shameless self-promoters with local businesses who need a cash infusion, trying to grab that kind of attention and money for their sandwich store or their weekly newspaper. Now everyone thinks they can find that viral moment but didn’t know they’d have to contend with how banal homelessness is. Homelessness is not a tourist draw nor should it be. The reality is that if we treated everyone the way the rich people of 1860s San Francisco treated Emperor Norton, we’d solve this problem very quickly.
Davinc should never have been on that sidewalk. Davinc should have been in an apartment, paid for by PG&E money. Just like Emperor Norton.
