Main article: Ybor CitySee also: History of Tampa, Florida
Ybor City (pronounced /ˈiːbɔr/ - EE-borh) is a historic neighborhood in Tampa, Florida, located just northeast of downtown. It was founded in 1885 by a group of cigar manufacturers led by Vicente Martinez-Ybor and was originally populated by the Cuban and Spanish immigrants who worked in the many cigar factories. The community was unique in the American south for its multi-ethnic nature and its civic organizations, which included mutual aid societies and an active organized labor presence.
Ybor City grew and prospered until the Great Depression, when a sharp reduction in the worldwide demand for fine cigars started the neighborhood on a slow decline. By the end of World War II, a steady stream of residents were leaving the aging neighborhood. This process accelerated through the 1950s and 60s, when the federal Urban Renewal program and the construction of Interstate 4 resulted in the destruction of many buildings in the area, including most of the housing units. Virtually abandoned, Ybor City lapsed into a decades-long period of neglect and decay.
Beginning in the 1980s, the area around the old Ybor City business district began a slow recovery; first as a haven for artists, and then as a popular nightlife and entertainment district by the 1990s. Since 2000, many multi-family residential units have been built and the population of the area has steadily increased.
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 of 1884.
The trip was long and difficult. The existing railroad line ended in Sanford, Florida (near present-day Orlando), and the rest of the trip was across the state by stagecoach over unpaved country roads.
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, and the local economy was struggling. However, Henry Plant was in the process of extending a railroad line across the state that would soon connect Tampa 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.
Gutierrez returned to New York by sea, stopping on the way to visit his friend Vicente Martinez Ybor at his home in Key West, Florida. 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 his cigar business in Key West, but was not satisfied with the island city. High costs, labor strife, and transportation issues (overseas land links were still decades away) had him exploring relocation options. 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. Ybor continued negotiating with other cities while opening talks with Tampa’s Board of Trade to secure land and other enticements.
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 40-acre tract of land that Ybor wished to purchase from a private owner. The owner wanted $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 businessmen were literally about to depart, the Tampa Board of Trade offered to subsidize the $4000 difference in the price of the land Ybor wished to buy.Ybor readily agreed, and quickly moved to purchased 50 more adjoining acres. Haya bought his own smaller tract.
Preparation for moving their cigar operations began immediately. Ybor invited Gavino Gutierrez to come to Tampa and lay out a street grid for a new town, which was to be dubbed Ybor City. On October 8, only three days after the deals were made, work got underway clearing the land.
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.
A different kind of 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 much of the housing and businesses in the town (such as Pullman, Illinois), Ybor envisioned a place in which employees would own their own homes and private entrepreneurs could buy land and start their own businesses. This, he hoped, would create a more pleasant environment for the residents of Ybor City.
Ybor 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, keeping his factories fully staffed year-round. .
So along with the Ybor and Haya’s cigar factories, among the first structures built in Ybor City were 50 small houses (‘’casitas’’) for prospective employees. These narrow shotgun-style homes (so called because a shot fired through the front door would theoretically exit harmlessly out of the aligned back door) were small wooden structures, but they were well-built and relatively comfortable. Ybor offered them for sale at a price just above the cost to build them (initially $400), payable in small deductions from the workers’ salary in the cigar factory.
Another of Ybor’s modifications to the company town model was that his community was not a one-(or even two-) company town. To increase the number of jobs (and thus the pool of available workers), Ybor encouraged other cigar manufacturers to move to his new colony by offering cheap land and a free factory building if they agreed to meet certain job-creation quotas.
Even with these inducements, cigar workers and other cig
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