Ybor City was designed, not grown. On 5 October 1885 Vicente Martinez Ybor contracted with the Tampa Board of Trade, took a 5,000 dollar subsidy and bought forty acres of scrub northeast of a town of a few thousand people. A Spanish civil engineer, Gavino Gutierrez, had recommended the site and then laid out its grid. Ybor built a brick factory and 176 wooden casitas for workers in the same season. Henry Plant's railroad and a deepwater port did the rest: Havana leaf in, clear Havana cigars out, without the tariff that Cuban-made cigars carried.
The labour came ready-made from Key West, pushed north by fire and by an increasingly brutal strike record. Cubans, Spaniards, Italians and later Romanian Jews filled the galeras, and by 1900 the district had over two hundred factories and the self-applied title of Cigar Capital of the World. Mutual aid societies organised almost everything the state did not: El Centro Espanol in 1891, L'Unione Italiana in 1894, Centro Asturiano and El Circulo Cubano in the early 1900s, and La Union Marti-Maceo, founded in 1904 by Afro-Cubans excluded from the others under Florida segregation law.
The politics were inseparable from the work. Jose Marti came to Ybor in November 1891 and spoke twice, and cigar workers pledged a share of their wages every week to the independence fund. The employers' response to their own workers' organising was less high-minded: some twenty-three walkouts between 1886 and 1910, the lynching of two Italian strikers in September 1910, a ten-month strike in 1920-21, and finally the 1931 strike over the abolition of the lector, in which the reading platforms were torn out and never replaced.
1885
On 5 October Vicente Martinez Ybor contracts with the Tampa Board of Trade and buys 40 acres with a 5,000 dollar subsidy.
1886
Sanchez y Haya rolls the first cigar in Ybor City on 13 April; Ybor's own brick factory opens later that year.
1886
Fire in Key West drives thousands of cigar workers north, giving the new town its workforce.
1887
Ybor City is annexed into Tampa on 15 July; the population passes 1,000.
1891
Jose Marti speaks in Ybor City on 26 and 27 November, setting out the aims of the coming revolutionary party.
1892
The
Partido Revolucionario Cubano is proclaimed; Tampa and Key West cigar workers pledge a day's pay a week to the fund.
1895
Marti sails for Cuba with Ybor volunteers and is killed in a skirmish in May.
1900
More than 200 factories operate in Tampa and West Tampa; the district calls itself the Cigar Capital of the World.
1910
On 20 September, during a seven-month strike, Italian strikers Castenge Ficarrotta and Angelo Albano are lynched. No one is convicted.
1920
A strike over the union shop begins on 14 April and lasts until 4 February 1921.
1929
Tampa output approaches 500 million cigars a year, the industry's high-water mark.
1931
Factory owners ban the lectores and tear out the reading platforms on 27 November; roughly 8,000 workers strike and lose. Radios replace readers.
1960s
Urban renewal and interstate construction clear about 70 acres of the historic district.
1990
Ybor City is designated a National Historic Landmark District on 14 December.
Tampa grew almost no tobacco. Its industry was built on the clear Havana principle: import Cuban leaf, which entered at a far lower tariff than finished Cuban cigars, and roll it on American soil with Cuban hands. That arrangement made the city the largest producer of handmade Havana-leaf cigars outside Cuba, and it collapsed in stages as machinery, cigarettes, the Depression and finally the 1962 embargo removed first the labour advantage and then the raw material itself. Today the surviving Tampa production works Nicaraguan, Honduran and Dominican leaf, and Florida-grown tobacco has never been more than a footnote here.
Vicente Martinez Ybor
Born in Valencia in 1818, made El Principe de Gales in Havana and Key West, founded Ybor City in 1885 and died in Tampa in 1896.
Ignacio Haya
Partner in Sanchez y Haya, whose factory rolled the first cigar in Ybor City on 13 April 1886, days ahead of Ybor's own.
Gavino Gutierrez
Spanish civil engineer who steered Ybor toward Tampa and then platted the company town's street grid.
Jose Marti
Raised the money and the men for Cuban independence among Tampa
tabaqueros, speaking in Ybor City repeatedly between 1891 and 1894.
Paulina Pedroso
Afro-Cuban boarding-house keeper who sheltered Marti after an attempt to poison him and whose land became Jose Marti Park.
Julius Caesar Newman
Founded J.C. Newman in 1895; the family firm moved to Tampa and still runs the El Reloj factory, the last of the city's originals.
Ybor Factory Building
Built 1886 at 1911 North 13th Street to a design by C. E. Parcell, the first brick cigar factory in Tampa and reputedly the largest in the world at the time. Converted to the Ybor Square marketplace in the mid-1970s.
Sanchez y Haya
The Seventh Avenue factory of Ignacio Haya, which produced Ybor City's first cigar on 13 April 1886 and gave the district its founding date.
El Reloj (J.C. Newman)
Built in 1910 on the north edge of Ybor City and named for its clock tower. It is the last working survivor of Tampa's roughly 150 cigar factories and still makes cigars by hand and on antique
bunching machines.
Arturo Fuente
Arturo Fuente Sr. began making cigars in the Tampa area in 1912. Fire destroyed the factory in 1924 and production did not resume until 1946; the family later left for the Dominican Republic.
Bustillo Bros. and Diaz
One of the larger Ybor houses of the 1900s and the focus of the September 1910 lockout, the dispute that ended in the lynching of two Italian strikers.
Ybor ran on the galera and the club. Rollers contributed about twenty-five cents a week each to pay a lector, who read the Havana and Tampa papers in the morning and novels after the break, and about the same again in weekly dues to a mutual aid society that provided a doctor, a pharmacy, a clinic and a burial. Those societies built the surviving landmarks of Seventh Avenue and organised its dances, theatre and baseball. Segregation split the Cuban community itself, and Afro-Cubans formed La Union Marti-Maceo in 1904 when they were shut out of the other clubs. When the lectores went in 1931 the district lost its daily newspaper, its serialised fiction and its political forum in one week.