History of Ybor City
| Ybor City | |
|---|---|
| Neighborhood | |
Gateway to Ybor City on 7th. Ave near the Nick Nuccio Parkway
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| Nickname(s): Florida's Latin Quarter | |
| Coordinates: 27°57′23.04″N 82°26′3.84″W / 27.9564000°N 82.4344000°WCoordinates: 27°57′23.04″N 82°26′3.84″W / 27.9564000°N 82.4344000°W | |
| Country | United States |
| State | Florida |
| County | Hillsborough County |
| City | Tampa |
| Founded | 1885 |
| Annexed by Tampa | 1887 |
| Time zone | EST (UTC-5) |
| • Summer (DST) | EDT (UTC-4) |
| Website | http://www.yboronline.com/ |
Ybor City (/ˈiːbɔːr/ EE-bor) is a historic neighborhood that includes the Ybor City Historic District in Tampa, Florida. It is located just northeast of downtown Tampa and north of Port Tampa Bay. The neighborhood has distinct architectural, culinary, cultural, and historical legacy that reflects its multi-ethnic composition. It was unique in the American South as a prosperous manufacturing community built and populated almost entirely by immigrants.
Ybor City was founded as an independent town in 1885 by a group of cigar manufacturers led by Vicente Martinez-Ybor and was annexed by Tampa in 1887. The original population was mostly composed of Cuban and Spanish immigrants who worked in the cigar factories. Italian and Eastern-European Jewish immigrants followed shortly thereafter and established many retail shops, farms and grocery stores, box factories, print shops, and other enterprises which catered to the cigar industry and its workers.
The neighborhood grew rapidly during the 1890s, quickly evolving from a primitive outpost with streets of loose sand populated mainly by young Cuban and Spanish men seeking work into a bustling city with modern amenities and a diverse demographic makeup. During this decade, Ybor City's residents founded mutual aid societies, labor organizations, newspapers in several languages, and many other social and civic organizations along with a diverse roster of businesses, helping to create a vibrant civil society that blended the residents' different cultures of origin into a new "Latin" culture unique to Tampa. Ybor City continued to grow and prosper through the 1920s, by which time its factories were producing almost half a billion hand-rolled cigars every year, giving Tampa the nickname of the "Cigar City".
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