Ybor City begins here, a historic neighborhood just northeast of downtown Tampa. In the 1880s this place was founded by Vicente Martinez Ybor and other cigar manufacturers, who brought thousands of immigrants from Cuba, Spain, and Italy. For the next 50 years workers in Ybor City's cigar factories rolled hundreds of millions of cigars annually.
You can imagine the hum of thousands of well-paid workers, a multiethnic, multiracial population organizing mutual aid societies to support one another. Those cigar jobs helped Tampa grow from an economically depressed village to a bustling city in about 20 years and even earned it the nickname "Cigar City. Ybor itself grew and flourished from the 1890s until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when a drop in demand for fine cigars and the mechanization of the industry greatly reduced employment and the number of factories.
After World War II that process accelerated, and a steady exodus left large areas of this once-vibrant neighborhood virtually abandoned. The buildings and streets still tell you where factories, societies, and the life of thousands of immigrant families once stood, their traces waiting along the block.