Hello, there.
Here's a key passage from The Emperor Norton Trust's new proposal that the California state legislature name the tunnel through Yerba Buena Island the Emperor Norton Tunnel in 2026 — the 90th anniversary of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge:
Emperor Norton is the person who, historically, has been most closely associated with setting out the earliest vision for a bridge directly linking Oakland and San Francisco across San Francisco Bay.
The route that Emperor Norton specified in his "bridge Proclamations" published in the Pacific Appeal newspaper on…
6 January 1872 — "from Oakland Point to Telegraph Hill, via Goat Island"
23 March 1872 — "from Oakland Point to Goat Island, and thence to Telegraph Hill'
21 September 1872 — "from Oakland Point via Goat Island"
...indicated the two endpoints and a midpoint: "from Oakland Point to Goat Island, and thence to Telegraph Hill."
But, by the time the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge was designed and constructed 60 years later, in the 1930s…
(a) The small promontory known as Oakland Point in the Emperor’s day long since had been "developed out of existence."
(b) The location selected for the San Francisco terminus of the Bay Bridge is a mile-and-a-half to the SOUTH of Telegraph Hill — at Rincon Point.
meaning that…
(c) The route of the bridge through Yerba Buena Island — what Emperor Norton and his contemporaries called "Goat Island" — is the most SPECIFIC part of the Emperor’s stated vision that actually came to pass.
Indeed, the tunnel is the architectural and engineering linchpin without which this particular Bay-spanning bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland could not exist.
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For our full proposal...
Go to EmperorNortonTunnel.org and click the PROPOSAL button.
Please share the proposal widely — and...
Please share this petition with any Emperor-sympathetic friend who has not already signed.
Cheers!
JOHN LUMEA
The Emperor Norton Trust