Ybor City
Based on Wikipedia: Ybor City
In 1885, a Spanish cigar manufacturer sat in a Tampa train station, bags packed, ready to leave for Jacksonville. He had come to Florida looking for a place to build his empire, and Tampa had just fallen through. The land deal had collapsed. He was done.
Then five men burst into the station.
They were members of Tampa's Board of Trade, and they were desperate. They had heard about the failed negotiation and realized they were about to lose the most important business opportunity their struggling village had ever seen. One of them, Frederick Salomonson, would later become mayor three times over. They pleaded with the cigar maker to reconsider, to give Tampa one more chance.
He did. And that decision transformed a swampy backwater of fewer than a thousand souls into the Cigar City, home to one of the most remarkable immigrant communities in American history.
The man's name was Vicente Martinez Ybor.
From Havana to Key West to Nowhere
Vicente Ybor knew how to read political weather. In 1869, watching Cuba's war for independence from Spain turn increasingly violent, he packed up his cigar operation and moved it to Key West, Florida. It was a sensible choice at the time. Key West was the closest American city to Havana, and Cuban cigar workers could easily make the crossing.
But Key West had problems. The island was cramped. Labor unions were aggressive. There was no room to expand, no way to build the kind of company town where Ybor could control every aspect of production. He needed somewhere new.
Tampa, in the early 1880s, was hardly an obvious choice. The town was isolated, economically depressed, and thoroughly unremarkable. But it had three things going for it: a decent port, a brand new railroad line built by the industrialist Henry Plant, and the kind of humid subtropical climate that keeps tobacco leaves pliable and workable. Dry air makes cigar rolling nearly impossible. Tampa's swampy mugginess was actually an asset.
The sandy scrubland northeast of downtown looked like nothing. But Ybor saw a blank canvas.
Building a City from Scratch
After that dramatic train station intervention, Ybor bought forty acres of land and immediately started buying more. He wasn't just building a factory. He was building an entire community.
Here's the thing about cigar making in the nineteenth century: it was a genuine craft, requiring years of training. You couldn't just hire local farm workers and expect them to produce quality cigars. The skilled labor had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was Cuba, Spain, and eventually Sicily.
To attract these workers, Ybor constructed hundreds of small houses before the workers even arrived. He was essentially building a city on spec, betting that if he provided housing, the cigar makers would come. They did. Many followed him directly from Key West and Cuba. Others came when they heard about the opportunities in this strange new cigar town rising from the Florida sand.
Other cigar manufacturers saw what Ybor was doing and wanted in. He welcomed them, even offered incentives. More factories meant a larger labor pool, which meant more skilled workers would be willing to relocate. By the 1890s, Tampa had transformed from an economically depressed village into a genuine city of nearly sixteen thousand people. The cigar industry had done that in barely a decade.
The Sicilian Connection
The Italians who came to Ybor City had a remarkably specific origin. They didn't come from all over Italy, or even all over Sicily. Sixty percent of them came from a single village: Santo Stefano Quisquina, a small town in the southwestern mountains of the island. The rest came from a handful of neighboring villages—Alessandria della Rocca, Bivona, Cianciana, and Contessa Entellina.
Why such a concentrated migration pattern? This is how chain migration works. One person makes it to a new place, sends word back home that there's work and housing, and soon their cousins and neighbors follow. Before long, you have a transplanted community, speaking the same dialect, worshipping at the same saints' festivals, cooking the same recipes their grandmothers taught them in the old country.
Many of these Sicilians took a roundabout path to Tampa. Some worked first in the sugar cane fields of central Florida, near a town called St. Cloud. Others came through Louisiana. A significant number fled New Orleans after one of the ugliest episodes in American immigrant history: the 1891 lynching of eleven Italians during what newspapers called the "Mafia Riot."
Unlike the Cuban and Spanish immigrants, the Italians arrived without cigar-making skills. This put them at the bottom of the factory hierarchy. They swept floors, hauled materials, worked as porters and doorkeepers. They labored alongside the other unskilled workers, many of whom were Afro-Cubans. The Italians settled on the eastern and southern edges of Ybor City, in an area locals called La Pachata—named after a Cuban rent collector—or simply Little Italy.
But here's where the story gets interesting. Italian women entered the cigar factories as strippers. Not that kind—cigar stripping means removing the stem and central vein from tobacco leaves, preparing them for the rollers. It was considered undesirable work, the job you took when you couldn't find anything else.
These women learned. They watched. They practiced. And eventually, many became skilled cigar makers themselves, earning more money than the Italian men in the same factories. Meanwhile, other Italian immigrants skipped the factory floor entirely, opening the small businesses that every community needs: cafés, groceries, restaurants, boarding houses.
The Hidden Immigrants
History remembers Ybor City as Cuban, Spanish, and Italian. But other groups lived there too, their stories largely forgotten.
German immigrants arrived after the 1890s, and they occupied a different niche entirely. While Cubans and Italians worked the factory floors, Germans ran things. They were managers, bookkeepers, supervisors. German-owned companies manufactured the wooden cigar boxes. German lithographers designed the ornate labels that adorned them. The Germans even formed their own social club, the Deutsch Amerikanischer Verein, with a building on Nebraska Avenue that included a restaurant serving German food.
Then came World War One.
Anti-German sentiment swept America, and the Deutsch Amerikanischer Verein suddenly felt very exposed. In 1919, they sold their building to the Young Men's Hebrew Association. The building still stands, now used as offices for the City of Tampa. The German community didn't disappear, but they stopped being visibly German.
Romanian Jews and Chinese immigrants also made homes in Ybor City. Neither group worked much in cigar manufacturing. Instead, they ran service businesses and retail shops, filling the commercial gaps that every neighborhood needs. Their stories are harder to trace, their presence less documented, but they were there.
The Clubs That Built a Community
Ybor City's mutual aid societies were something genuinely unusual in the American South of that era. These weren't charities run by wealthy benefactors. They were democratic organizations built and sustained by ordinary working people.
The system worked like this: you joined a club and paid dues, typically about five percent of your salary. In return, you and your entire family received an astonishing array of services. Free medical care. Free libraries. Educational programs. Sports teams. Restaurants. Dances and picnics and social events of every kind.
The first club, the Centro Español, opened in 1891. Others followed quickly. L'Unione Italiana for the Italians. El Circulo Cubano for light-skinned Cubans. El Centro Asturiano, which became the largest by accepting members from any ethnic background. There was even a club for Germans and Eastern Europeans.
These weren't just service providers. They were community centers, extended families, the social glue that held a neighborhood of recent immigrants together. Generations of Ybor City residents grew up attending club dances, playing on club sports teams, getting treated by club doctors.
But Florida was still the Jim Crow South, and its laws cast an ugly shadow even over this unusually integrated community.
The Color Line
Afro-Cubans couldn't join the same clubs as their lighter-skinned countrymen. Florida law forbade it. This created situations that were cruel in their absurdity: sometimes members of the same family had different skin tones, and brothers or cousins would be forced to join different organizations. One might be welcome at El Circulo Cubano while the other had to go to La Union Marti-Maceo, the club for Black Cubans.
Inside Ybor City itself, there was little overt racism. The neighborhood was simply too diverse, too dependent on cooperation across ethnic lines. Cubans, Spaniards, Italians, Jews, Germans, Chinese—they all lived and worked in close proximity. The cigar factories employed workers of multiple backgrounds side by side.
But the state's segregation laws couldn't be ignored. They created fractures in what might otherwise have been a unified community, forcing artificial divisions based on skin color that cut across the more natural divisions of language and national origin.
The rivalries between clubs were mostly friendly. Families sometimes switched affiliations depending on which club offered better services or more appealing social events. But that forced separation of the Afro-Cuban community remained a permanent wound.
Five Hundred Million Cigars
Production peaked in 1929.
That year, the factories of Ybor City rolled five hundred million cigars. Half a billion. The number is almost impossible to visualize. If you laid them end to end, they would circle the Earth more than twice.
And 1929 was, of course, the year everything fell apart.
The Great Depression devastated the cigar industry. Suddenly, consumers who had once bought hand-rolled premium cigars were looking to cut costs. Cigarettes were cheaper. Machine-rolled cigars were cheaper. The craftsmanship that had built Ybor City became a liability.
Throughout the 1930s, factory after factory switched from hand-rolling to mechanization. Each machine eliminated dozens of skilled jobs. The workers who remained earned less. The neighborhood that had been built on well-paid craft labor began to hollow out.
The Bolita Houses
During the 1920s, while the cigar industry still boomed, organized crime found fertile ground in Ybor City. The Tampa mafia ran bootlegging operations during Prohibition, but their signature enterprise was something called bolita.
Bolita was a numbers game, a form of lottery gambling that was illegal but enormously popular. By 1927, there were over three hundred bolita houses operating in Ybor City alone. The game was simple: you picked a number, placed a bet, and if your number came up, you won. The odds heavily favored the house, but the bets were small enough that working people could afford to play, and the dream of a big payout kept them coming back.
The mafia presence would persist in Tampa for decades, long outlasting the cigar industry that had created the neighborhood in the first place.
The Emptying Out
After World War Two, Ybor City began a long decline.
Returning veterans faced a difficult choice. The neighborhood had few well-paying jobs left. The cigar factories were either closed or mechanized. And the federal government's new Veterans Administration home loan program—designed to help returning soldiers buy houses—only applied to new construction. Ybor City's housing stock dated from the 1880s and 1890s. If you wanted to use your VA loan, you had to leave.
Many did. The young and ambitious moved to the suburbs, to neighborhoods with modern houses and better prospects. The people who stayed were increasingly those who couldn't afford to leave.
Then came urban renewal.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal Urban Renewal program promised to revitalize declining urban neighborhoods. The theory was that you demolished the old, decaying buildings and replaced them with modern development. In practice, the demolition happened but the redevelopment often didn't. Ybor City was left with blocks of vacant lots where historic buildings had once stood.
The final blow came when Interstate 4 was routed directly through the center of the neighborhood. Highway construction destroyed more buildings and severed most of the north-south streets that had connected different parts of the community. The neighborhood was literally cut in half.
By the early 1970s, Ybor City was nearly a ghost town. Perhaps a thousand residents remained in an area that had once held tens of thousands. The streets that had been "colorful, screaming, shrill, and turbulent" were quiet and mostly empty.
Almost everything was gone. But the Columbia Restaurant was still there, still serving Spanish food on Seventh Avenue, the last major business standing in a neighborhood that had once been the engine of Tampa's economy.
The Artists Arrive
Revival came from an unexpected direction. In the early 1980s, artists began discovering Ybor City.
They weren't drawn by the history, at least not primarily. They were drawn by the real estate. Here were beautiful old brick buildings, many of them abandoned, available for almost nothing. If you wanted cheap studio space with character, Ybor City was perfect.
Artists are often the first wave of gentrification. They move into neglected neighborhoods because that's what they can afford. They fix up old buildings, open galleries and performance spaces, create a scene. And eventually, their presence makes the neighborhood attractive to people with more money.
That's exactly what happened. By the early 1990s, Seventh Avenue had transformed into an entertainment district. The old brick buildings became bars, restaurants, and nightclubs. Traffic grew so heavy that the city built parking garages and eventually closed Seventh Avenue to vehicles entirely.
Ybor City became a party destination, famous for its nightlife. The Brooklyn rock band The Hold Steady referenced it repeatedly in their lyrics. "Ybor City is très speedy," they sang, "but they throw such killer parties."
The Second Life
Since 2000, the neighborhood has continued to evolve. The city of Tampa and local business groups have pushed for a broader mix of development. Centro Ybor, a shopping complex and movie theater, opened in the former home of the Centro Español social club. The old Florida Brewing Company building was restored for commercial use. New apartments and condominiums have risen on those long-vacant urban renewal lots.
For the first time in over half a century, Ybor City's population is growing. Between 2000 and 2003, the neighborhood's population increased by over forty percent, though it remained far below its historic peak.
In 2008, the American Planning Association named Seventh Avenue one of the ten great streets in America. The neighborhood has been designated a National Historic Landmark District, and several individual buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Columbia Restaurant, still operating, was named one of the fifty "All-American icons" by Nation's Restaurant News.
Even IKEA showed up, opening a store on Ybor City's southern edge in 2009. It's hard to imagine a more definitive sign that a neighborhood has rejoined the mainstream economy.
What Remains
The Ybor City Museum State Park occupies the former Ferlita Bakery building on Ninth Avenue. Rangers give tours of the gardens and the "casitas"—the small houses that cigar workers once lived in. Exhibits and period photographs tell the story of the neighborhood's founding and its vanished industry.
Many of the old street grids remain, laid out by an engineer named Gavino Guiterrez in 1885. Some roads are still paved with their original materials, though most have been modernized. The neighborhood's boundaries have shifted and blurred over the decades. Historic Ybor, the core district, covers about a square mile, roughly straddling the interstate that bisected it.
The mutual aid society buildings still stand, though they serve different purposes now. The cigar factories are mostly gone or converted to other uses. The last major cigar manufacturer, J.C. Newman, still operates a factory in Tampa, a living link to the industry that built the city.
What's harder to preserve is the culture itself. The immigrants who built Ybor City are gone, their children and grandchildren scattered across Florida and beyond. The neighborhood that remains is not the same community—it can't be. You can restore buildings, but you can't restore a way of life.
Still, something of the original spirit persists. Ybor City remains one of the most distinctive neighborhoods in Florida, a place where you can still see the bones of what was once one of America's great immigrant communities. The cigar industry that created it is history now, but the streets Vicente Martinez Ybor laid out still carry traffic, the buildings his workers built still stand, and people still come to Seventh Avenue looking for something more interesting than the suburbs can offer.
All because five desperate businessmen convinced a Spanish cigar maker to miss his train to Jacksonville.