Museum, urban park reveal diverse heritage of Ybor City
In contrast to Massachusetts or Virginia, Florida’s oldest families don’t have names like Winthrop or Randolph. Here, folks with names such as Solana and Sanchez walked the streets of St. Augustine hundreds of years ago.
Later, in Tampa’s Ybor City, people from Cuba, Spain, Sicily and other locations arrived to form what Florida historian Gary Mormino has called “one of the great immigrant communities in America” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
That Tampa story is told well at the Ybor City Museum, which is part of Florida’s state park system — an “urban park” dedicated to preserving Ybor City’s remarkable cultural heritage. Here’s just a bit of what you might learn on a visit.
Center of history
Many Central Floridians know Ybor City as the home of the landmark Columbia Restaurant, Florida’s oldest (1905), and as a center of bars and clubs. But it’s also a National Historic Landmark district that comprises more than 950 historic buildings and structures built between 1886 and World War I, during the reign of the industry that inspired Tampa to be dubbed the Cigar City.
Ybor City’s namesake, Vicente Martínez-Ybor, was born in Spain in 1818 and lived for 15 years in Spanish Cuba, where he founded the “Prince of Wales” cigar brand. As a supporter of Cuban independence, he began moving his factories to the United States in the late 1860s, first to Key West and New York City.
In 1885, Martínez-Ybor formed a partnership with
a friend, Ignacio Haya, to develop a cigar-manufacturing town near Tampa, then a city of around 700 and an ideal location because of its warm climate and its proximity to Cuba — MartínezYbor’s favorite source of workers and of tobacco.
Construction for cigar workers’ houses began in 1886, and soon Ybor City was home to 3,000 new residents. By 1890, its
population had doubled to around 6,000. Although many came from Cuba or Spain, Ybor City also became home to Italian, German, Romanian Jewish and Chinese immigrants.
Because of its large Cuban population, the community became a focal point for activities that supported Cuban independence from Spain. Independence leader José Martí visited Ybor City to raise money and build support. In the cigar factories, lectors (“lectores” in Cuba) read to workers from books and from patriotic newspapers and helped spread the word about Martí’s cause.
Tampa’s cigar industry peaked in the 1920s and then faced the Great Depression and rising mechanization, which hit the industry hard. In the
1960s, an urban renewal project destroyed a large part of Ybor City but also inspired a historic-preservation movement in the 1980s and 1990s.
Chickens and baseball, too
Today, the Ybor City Museum State Park is an urban park and historical museum in the heart of the National Historic Landmark District at 1818 9th Ave., Tampa. It’s about a 90-minute drive from downtown Orlando and consists of a main exhibit space, housed in the historic Ferlita Bakery building, as well as a Mediterranean-style garden and a recreated cigar worker’s house.
If you visit, be sure to see the short documentary film, “Ybor City: A Passage in Time.” Currently, the museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The cost is $4 per person; children 5 and younger are free. For more information, visit ybormuseum.org.
Each Saturday, Ybor City’s Centennial Park, across from the museum, is home to an outdoor market, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. through April (and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. from May to October). Details: ybormarket.com.
It’s a great place to snack on arepas and watch the formidable wild chickens, said to be descendants of birds that roamed Ybor City more than a century ago. “If you live in Ybor City, you can’t dislike the chickens, because, like it or not, they have been there longer than you,” according to YborCityOnline.com.
Just around the corner from the Ybor City Museum, the compact Tampa Baseball Museum opened at 2003 N. 19th St. in late September, in the childhood home of Tampa baseball legend Al Lopez, which was moved to the site from its original location about a mile away. Born in 1908 in Tampa, Lopez became the city’s first Major League player, manager, and Hall of Fame inductee.
Baseball’s roots run deep in Tampa, where the first team was organized in 1878, and the game played a major role in shaping the Tampa Bay community and bringing together the wide range of cultures and heritage in the region, according to the museum’s website. Cuban immigrants especially brought with them a deep love for the game.
Advance online reservations are recommended, but walk-ups can visit the Baseball Museum on a space-available basis. For more information, visit TampaBaseballMuseum. org or call 813-247-1434.