Real Estate Ybor City, Tampa, Hillsborough County, Florida

Ybor City

You'll know you've entered Ybor City when the streets turn from asphalt to brick and the lampposts from concrete to ornate wrought iron. When the atmosphere turns from button-down to bottoms up. No sterile high-rises here! Ybor City's buildings bespeak a bygone era when craftsmen prided themselves on quality workmanship. At every turn are elements of classical and Mediterranean architecture.

This multicultural enclave started out as 40 acres of swamp and scrub northeast of Tampa. The name Ybor (pronounced EE-bore) belongs to one of its founders. In 1886, cigar makers Vicente Martinez-Ybor and Ignacio Haya moved their cigar factories from Key West to Tampa.

Tampa had everything the cigar makers needed: a railroad, a port and a warm climate that provided a natural humidor for the tobacco leaf. Once the cigar making was under way, Ybor City became home to Cuban, Spanish and Italian immigrants who worked in more than 140 cigar factories in and around the area, producing 250-million cigars a year.

Out on La Septima Avenida (Seventh Avenue), trolley cars carried residents across town, boys sold deviled crabs on the corner and everyone was reading the latest edition of La Gaceta, Ybor's tri-lingual newspaper that is still in print today.

For more than half a century, Ybor City was the "Cigar Capital of the World." While the cigar industry was thriving, Ybor City was alive and kicking with Latin culture and language. Ybor City is a National Historic Landmark District, one of only three in Florida.

One Ybor landmark since 1905 is the Columbia Restaurant, which today is Florida's oldest and the world's largest Spanish restaurant. 4th & 5th generation members of the Hernandez Gonzmart family work hard to preserve the family's legacy that their great-grandfather Casimiro Hernandez Sr. created nearly 100 years ago when he opened the Columbia as a corner café frequented by local cigar workers. Guests enjoy many of the same century-old family recipes that have made the Columbia famous.

Adapted from http://www.ybortimes.com/history.cfm


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