Ybor City

Ybor City is a historic neighborhood just northeast of downtown Tampa, founded in the 1880s by Vicente Martinez Ybor and other cigar manufacturers and built by thousands of immigrants from Cuba, Spain and Italy, among them many Afro-Cuban cigar workers. For about 50 years its factories rolled hundreds of millions of cigars a year, earning Tampa the nickname "Cigar City". Its workers built mutual aid societies that gave members and their families free medical care, libraries, schools and social halls: El Centro Español (the first, founded in 1891), El Centro Asturiano, El Círculo Cubano, L'Unione Italiana, and La Unión Martí-Maceo, the society of Afro-Cuban workers, whom Florida's Jim Crow laws barred from joining the other Cuban club. In the 1890s José Martí came to Ybor City to rally its cigar workers behind Cuban independence, speaking to the community in 1891 and from the steps of the Ybor factory building in 1893. Today its cigar factories, club buildings and brick streets form a National Historic Landmark District designated in 1990, with 7th Avenue as its main street of restaurants and nightlife.