Ybor City ( ) is a historic neighborhood that includes the Ybor City Historic District in Tampa, Florida. It is located just northeast of downtown Tampa and north of Port Tampa Bay. The neighborhood has distinct architectural, culinary, cultural, and historical legacy that reflects its multi-ethnic composition. It was unique in the American South as a prosperous manufacturing community built and populated almost entirely by immigrants.
Ybor City was founded as an independent town in 1885 by a group of cigar manufacturers led by Vicente Martinez-Ybor and was annexed by Tampa in 1887. The original population was mostly composed of Cuban and Spanish immigrants who worked in the cigar factories. Italian and Eastern-European Jewish immigrants followed shortly thereafter and established many retail shops, farms and grocery stores, box factories, print shops, and other enterprises which catered to the cigar industry and its workers.
Martinez-Ybor started the practice of building small houses, "casitas", that his workers could buy at cost, in order to increase staff retention. He also helped to ensure medical care and paved the local streets and sidewalks.Ybor City: Past, Present, and Future
The neighborhood grew rapidly during the 1890s, quickly evolving from a primitive outpost with streets of loose sand populated mainly by young Cuban and Spanish men seeking work into a bustling city with modern amenities and a diverse demographic makeup. During this decade, Ybor City's residents founded mutual aid societies, labor organizations, newspapers in several languages, and many other social and civic organizations along with a diverse roster of businesses, helping to create a vibrant civil society that blended the residents' different cultures of origin into a new "Latin" culture unique to Tampa. Ybor City continued to grow and prosper through the 1920s, by which time its factories were producing almost half a billion hand-rolled cigars every year, giving Tampa the nickname of the "Cigar City".
The coming of the Great Depression in the early 1930s brought a sharp reduction in the worldwide demand for fine cigars, and Ybor City's economic base suffered greatly. Some cigar factories closed, others ended the hand-rolled tradition and turned to mechanization to reduce costs, and remaining operations sharply decreased production and payrolls, resulting in widespread unemployment and hardship across the entire neighborhood. Demand for cigars increased after World War II, but by that time, almost all of Ybor City's cigar factories were mechanized and did not re-hire the skilled and well-paid artisans they had once employed by the thousands. As veterans returned from the war, they largely chose to leave the aging neighborhood for areas with better housing and economic prospects, accelerating the trend of declining population and economic contraction. This process accelerated further through the 1950s and 60s, when the federal Urban Renewal program and the construction of Interstate 4 resulted in the demolition of many structures, including hundreds of housing units. Planned redevelopment never took place, and, with its commercial district and social core virtually abandoned, Ybor City lapsed into a period of neglect and decay.
Beginning in the 1980s, the old business district centered on 7th Avenue (La Septima) began a slow recovery, first as a bohemian haven for artists and, by the early 1990s, as a popular nightlife and entertainment district. Since 2000, many historic structures near 7th Avenue have been renovated and restored, and construction has filled in most long-vacant lots. Among the new structures are hotels, office and retail space, and apartment complexes, leading to the Ybor City's first population increases in over half a century. Residential areas such as V.M. Ybor and Tampa Heights have also begun to see gentrification, with older structures being restored and new ones built.
While Ybor City's old business district and some nearby residential areas have been revitalized, not all of the original neighborhood has shared in the recovery. Poverty and blight are ongoing problems in portions of Greater Ybor City, especially north of I-4 and east of 22nd Street.
Establishment
Guavas and cigars
Ybor City came into existence as a direct result of a New York City businessman's failed search for guava trees. Spanish émigré Gavino Gutierrez was a civil engineer by training, but was employed by a New York City fruit packing and canning firm in the mid-1880s. He had heard that there were many guava trees growing wild in the Tampa Bay area and, looking to add to his company's product line, set out to find them in November 1884.
The trip was long and difficult. The existing railroad line to Florida run by the Plant System only went as far south as Jacksonville, Florida, with a steamboat connection down the St. Johns River to Sanford, Florida (near present-day Orlando). Gutierrez took the rest of the trip across the state by stagecoach over unpaved country roads (an isolated rail line, the South Florida Railroad, connected Sanford and Tampa at this time and was completed less than a year prior to Gutierrez's visit). Gutierrez did not find any commercial quality guavas in the isolated village of Tampa. The community's main commercial activities were fishing and the shipping of Florida cattle and citrus from its small port. The local economy was struggling; however, Henry Plant, owner of the Plant System and majority shareholder of the South Florida Railroad, was in the process of extending his network of railroad lines across the state, which would eventually connect Tampa directly with the rest of the U.S. rail system. Gutierrez left Tampa convinced that the area had the potential for development once the railroad was complete. Tampa would acquire its first direct rail connection to the rest of the country via a line built by the Jacksonville, Tampa and Key West Railway, which opened on February 20, 1886, and connected the Plant System at Jacksonville with the South Florida Railroad at Sanford. This line would later be purchased by the Plant System in 1899.
Gutierrez returned to New York by sea, stopping on the way to visit his friend Vicente Martinez Ybor at his home in Key West. Ybor was a fellow Spaniard who had built a prosperous cigar-making operation in Havana, Cuba based on his El Príncipe de Gales (Prince of Wales) brand. However, Ybor had provided public support and private financial assistance to Cuban revolutionaries fighting against Spanish colonial rule, and had escaped from Cuba with his family in 1868 to avoid being arrested or killed by the Spanish authorities.
Ybor rebuilt a successful business in Key West. However, by the early 1880s, high costs, labor strife, and transportation issues (overseas land links were still decades away) had him exploring relocation options once again. Several southern American port cities such as Mobile, Alabama; Pensacola, Florida; and Galveston, Texas had offered land and other concessions to attract Ybor's factories to their town, but none of the proposals were satisfactory.
Upon learning about Ybor's plans, Gutierrez mentioned Tampa as another possible site for relocation. Ybor was intrigued, as was Ignacio Haya, a visiting Spanish cigar manufacturer from New York who was also looking for a new factory location.
Haya and Ybor boarded the next available steamship sailing for Tampa and arrived the next day. They agreed that Tampa was an excellent location for cigar production: it was near enough to Cuba that importing Cuban tobacco by sea would be quick and cheap; the climate was warm and humid, which would keep the tobacco leaves fresh and workable; and Plant's new railroad line would make it easy to ship the finished cigars across the United States. However, Ybor continued negotiating with other cities while opening talks with Tampa's Board of Trade to secure land and other enticements.
Making a deal Months later, in September 1885, Ybor and Haya set out on a "fact-finding mission" to the most promising relocation sites, hoping to finalize a deal and begin moving their operations soon thereafter. Their first visit was to Tampa, where the sticking point was the price of a tract of land that Ybor was interested in buying from John T. Lesley for $9000, but Ybor was only willing to pay $5000. Ybor had hoped that face to face negotiations would facilitate an agreement, but neither side was willing to budge.
Seemingly at an impasse, Ybor and Haya prepared to move on to their next potential site: Galveston, Texas. But on October 5, 1885, as the men were literally about to depart, the Tampa Board of Trade, including W. C. Brown and W. B. Henderson, offered to subsidize the $4000 difference in the price of the land Ybor wished to buy. Ybor readily agreed, and quickly moved to purchase 50 more adjoining acres. Haya bought his own smaller tract.
Preparation to move their cigar operations began immediately. On October 8, only three days after making the real estate deals, Ybor had crews at work clearing the land and had invited Gavino Gutierrez to lay out a street grid for a new town, which was to be dubbed Ybor City.
There was almost a major crisis before the settlement got started. The only bank in Tampa at the time was a branch of the Jacksonville-based First National Bank. Due to the stagnant state of commercial business in town, bank management had decided to close the location. When Ignacio Haya heard the news, he visited the bank's office to find the fixtures and equipment being packed up for shipment back to Jacksonville. Haya explained to branch manager T.C. Taliaferro that he and Ybor would need the services of a local bank to run their operations, and promised that the initial payroll would come to at least $10,000. On his own volition, Taliaferro began unpacking the boxes. The branch remained open and the crisis was averted.
Company town Cigar making was not just a job to the tabaqueros (literally, "tobacco workers"). The torcedores who rolled the finished cigars, especially, thought of themselves as "more of an artist than a worker." The trade was closely regulated by the tabaqueros in a manner reminiscent of the artisan's guilds of old Europe. Beginners trained through lengthy apprenticeships in the hopes of someday becoming a well-respected (and well-paid) master torcedor.
Key West was home to thousands of trained tabaqueros in 1885. In contrast, Tampa was a small town with a population of about 3,000 and no resident cigar workers. Ybor would have to convince potential employees to leave established communities in Key West (and Cuba and New York) to help build a frontier settlement. While he enjoyed the goodwill of many Cuban tabaqueros because of his well-known support for Cuba Libre, that would not be enough.
Ybor's idea was to build a modified company town. Unlike other such communities in which the company owned virtually all of the housing and businesses (such as Pullman, Illinois), Ybor envisioned a place in which employees could own their homes and private entrepreneurs could buy land on which to build businesses. This, he hoped, would create a pleasant environment to better attract more residents to Ybor City.
Ybor also had good business reasons to be magnanimous. His goal was to not only attract residents to town, but to get them to stay. His employees in Key West had often traveled back and forth between Florida and Cuba looking for the best pay and conditions. By offering the anchor of land and home ownership – something most tabaqueros had never experienced, especially in land-scarce Key West – Ybor encouraged his workers to stick around. Though the workforce was still relatively fluid in the early years, enough workers remained in Tampa to keep the cigar factories fully staffed and running year-round.