The hand-rolled cigar trade faded by the middle of the twentieth century as machines and changing tastes took over, and Ybor went quiet for a while. But the brick survived, and from the 1980s the district came back as a National Historic Landmark, its factories and social clubs reborn as a cultural quarter. Modern Tampa runs on a deepwater port, a working downtown and Riverwalk, and the long curve of Bayshore Boulevard along the bay — a Gulf Coast city still proud of the immigrants who built it.
What turned the frontier town into a city was Ybor City. Martinez Ybor, his partner Eduardo Manrara, rival manufacturer Ignacio Haya, and the engineer Gavino Gutierrez laid out a planned cigar town that quickly became one of the most distinctive immigrant communities in the South. The tabaqueros rolled at long benches while a lector read aloud from newspapers and novels to the whole gallery. Cuban, Spanish, Sicilian, and Afro-Cuban families built mutual-aid clubs — El Centro Espanol, the Centro Asturiano — that ran their own clinics and ballrooms. The Cuban sandwich and cafe con leche are Ybor inventions. At its peak Ybor and neighboring West Tampa held scores of brick factories employing thousands of rollers. It was, and is, a true Latin Quarter.
Why People Visit Tampa
Tampa draws travelers who want real heritage with Gulf sunshine — the brick-and-cigar history of Ybor's Latin Quarter, the fairy-tale minarets of Plant's hotel, the bay and the Riverwalk, and a pirate festival unlike anywhere else. It is a city that wears its immigrant, working-waterfront story openly, an easy gateway to the Gulf beaches just across the bay.
