Vicente Martinez Ybor had already moved his cigar operation once, from Cuba to Key West in 1869, to escape political turmoil in the Spanish colony. But Key West had its own problems -- labor unrest, cramped quarters, no room to build. Ybor wanted a company town, and he scouted locations across the American South before settling on an area of sandy scrubland northeast of Tampa. In 1885, the Tampa Board of Trade helped broker the initial land purchase, and Ybor began building. The Italians who followed came mostly from a handful of villages in southwestern Sicily -- Santo Stefano Quisquina, Alessandria della Rocca, Bivona, Cianciana, and Contessa Entellina -- with sixty percent from Santo Stefano Quisquina alone. Some had first worked sugar cane plantations in central Florida. Others came by way of Louisiana, fleeing after the lynching of eleven Italians in New Orleans in 1891. By 1887, Tampa had annexed the neighborhood. By 1900, wooden shacks and sandy roads had given way to brick buildings, paved streets, and a streetcar line.

The mutual aid societies of Ybor City were something between a social club and a welfare state, built and sustained by ordinary citizens. Members paid dues -- usually five percent of their salary -- and in return, their entire family received free medical care, access to libraries, educational programs, sports teams, restaurants, and an endless calendar of dances, picnics, and social events. The first, Centro Espanol, was established in 1891. Others followed along ethnic lines: L'Unione Italiana for the Italians, El Circulo Cubano for light-skinned Cubans, La Union Marti-Maceo for Afro-Cubans, and the largest of all, El Centro Asturiano, which accepted members of any ethnic group. Florida's Jim Crow laws cast a bitter shadow over this otherwise remarkable experiment in diversity, forbidding Afro-Cubans from belonging to the same organizations as their lighter-skinned countrymen. Sometimes differences in skin color within the same family made joining the same club impossible. But the rivalries between clubs were mostly friendly, and families switched affiliations depending on which offered the best services and events.

Cigar production peaked in 1929, the same year the Great Depression began -- a coincidence that reads like a parable. Worldwide demand plummeted as consumers switched to cheaper cigarettes, and factories responded by laying off workers or mechanizing. The hand-rollers who had built Ybor City found themselves replaced by machines. After World War II, returning veterans left the neighborhood for new suburbs, lured by VA home loans that applied only to new construction. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the federal Urban Renewal program tried to revitalize the area by demolishing aging structures, but the promised redevelopment never materialized. The legacy was blocks of vacant lots that sat empty for decades. The construction of Interstate 4 through the center of the neighborhood destroyed more buildings and severed the north-south routes that had connected Ybor's streets. During the 1920s, organized crime had also sunk deep roots: by 1927, there were over 300 bolita gambling houses in Ybor City. By the late 1970s, the population had collapsed to perhaps 1,000 residents.

Recovery came from an unlikely source. In the early 1980s, artists looking for cheap, interesting studio space began moving into the long-empty brick buildings along 7th Avenue. They were followed by bars, restaurants, and nightclubs through the 1990s, and traffic grew so much that the city built parking garages and eventually closed 7th Avenue to vehicle traffic. In 2008, the American Planning Association recognized 7th Avenue as one of the ten great streets in America. The Columbia Restaurant, which has operated continuously in Ybor since 1903, was named a top fifty all-American icon by Nation's Restaurant News in 2010. The TECO Line Streetcar, connecting Ybor City to downtown Tampa and the Channelside District, began operating in 2002. The Ybor City Museum State Park, housed in the former Ferlita Bakery building on 9th Avenue, preserves the story of the neighborhood's founding and its cigar-making industry, with tours of the surrounding casitas -- the small homes where cigar workers once lived.

Ybor City produced a remarkable roster of civic leaders: Al Lopez, the first Tampa native to play Major League Baseball, manage a major league team, and enter the Baseball Hall of Fame. Baldomero Lopez, Medal of Honor recipient during the Korean War. Braulio Alonso, the first Hispanic president of the National Education Association. The neighborhood's cultural influence extends into literature and film as well. Nilo Cruz set his 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Anna in the Tropics in Ybor's cigar factories. Dennis Lehane's novel Live by Night, adapted into a 2016 film directed by and starring Ben Affleck, centers on an Ybor City bootlegger during Prohibition. Today the neighborhood is a National Historic Landmark District, its streets a palimpsest of the immigrant ambition that built Tampa into a city. The roosters still roam free through the historic blocks, a small, feathered reminder that Ybor City has never been fully domesticated.