While the tabaqueros worked, a railroad baron built a fantasy across the river. Henry B. Plant ran his rail line into Tampa and in 1891 opened the Tampa Bay Hotel, a quarter-mile of Moorish Revival brick crowned with silver minarets and onion domes — the most extravagant building in Florida. Plant's railroad and steamships tied Tampa to the world and helped make it a real port; in 1898 the hotel and the city served as a staging point for U.S. troops bound for Cuba in the Spanish-American War. The hotel survives today as the University of Tampa and the Henry B. Plant Museum, its minarets still the city's signature skyline against the bay.
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.
