West Tampa: The Other Cigar City

By Joe Marzo

When most people hear the phrase "Cigar City," they picture Ybor City — the cobblestone streets, the wrought-iron balconies, the Columbia Restaurant glowing on Seventh Avenue. Ybor gets the postcards, the historic landmark designation, and most of the tourists. But just across the Hillsborough River sits a neighborhood with a stronger claim to the title than its more famous neighbor. West Tampa was, after all, an independent municipality for thirty years, and at its peak it housed more than one hundred cigar factories. With apologies to Ybor, this is the story of the other Cigar City.

A Scotsman's Gamble

West Tampa exists because of a Scottish lawyer with an eye for opportunity. Hugh Campbell Macfarlane was born near Glasgow in 1851 and arrived in Tampa in the mid-1880s, just as the village was beginning its transformation from a sleepy fishing town into a cigar boomtown. Macfarlane opened a law practice, helped reincorporate the city of Tampa as its city and state's attorney in 1887, and then made the move that would define the rest of his life: he started buying up land on the western bank of the Hillsborough River.

By 1892, Macfarlane and his Macfarlane Investment Company controlled several hundred acres of pine forest and swamp on the far side of the river — land most Tampans considered useless. His vision was straightforward and audacious. Vicente Martinez Ybor had already proven that a cigar town could be conjured out of nothing northeast of Tampa. Macfarlane intended to do the same thing on the opposite side of the river.

In June 1892, he built the first cigar factory in the area on Howard Avenue and leased it to A. Del Pino and Company. Del Pino failed financially, and the building sat until 1894, when O'Halloran Cigar Company moved in and got the operation running. Beginning in 1891, Macfarlane and his partners offered generous loans, land grants, and incentive packages to lure cigar manufacturers from Key West, New York, and Havana. One by one, they came.

La Caimanería

On May 18, 1895, a bill passed the Florida legislature creating the municipality of West Tampa. The new city had over 2,000 residents — most of them young, single Cuban and Spanish men who had come to roll cigars. Its first mayor was Fernando Figueredo, a prominent figure in the Cuban revolutionary movement, which signaled from day one that this would be a town shaped by Cuban hands and Cuban politics.

Early West Tampa was rough. The eastern end near the river was swampy enough that residents nicknamed the area La Caimanería — "the place of alligators." Anglo Tampa called it everything from a Wild West town to an alligator hole. Travel was a problem too.

The first cigar factory had to temporarily close because workers refused to ride the small ferry across the Hillsborough River to reach it. Macfarlane eventually extended the Tampa streetcar line across the river, but West Tampa's own streets remained unpaved until 1903, when the city council finally began laying them with clay shipped from Bartow and, later, with brick.

Despite the rough beginnings, growth was extraordinary. By 1900, West Tampa had more residents than Tallahassee, the state capital. By 1912, with 8,258 residents, it was the fifth-largest city in Florida. Almost half of the residents of the broader Tampa area were immigrants or had at least one foreign-born parent, and West Tampa quickly became one of the most concentrated Latino communities in the state — second only to Ybor City itself.

The Factories and the Workers

At its 1920s peak, West Tampa was home to more than one hundred cigar factories of varying sizes. The largest were industrial cathedrals: three- and four-story brick buildings with tall arched windows, designed to flood the rolling floors with natural light. The names on the buildings became famous well beyond Florida. A. Santaella and Company. Cuesta, Rey & Co. Morgan Cigars. Monne Brothers. Garcia y Vega. O'Halloran. Colonel William T. Morgan's three-story factory, built in 1907, employed a thousand workers within three years and had to expand to a larger building.

Inside these factories, the workers — tabaqueros — practiced one of the most highly skilled trades in American manufacturing. A good roller could produce hundreds of cigars a day, working from leaves of Cuban tobacco that arrived by ship from Havana. Pay was based on skill rather than race, which made cigar work one of the few industries in the Jim Crow South that offered Afro-Cuban workers a path to a middle-class wage. Lectores — readers — sat on raised platforms reading newspapers, novels, and political tracts aloud to the workers below, paid out of the rollers' own pockets. Combined, the factories of West Tampa and Ybor City produced more hand-rolled cigars than any other locale in the world during the early twentieth century, earning the broader Tampa area its lasting nickname.

A City Within a Culture

West Tampa was never just an industrial extension of Ybor across the river. It developed its own distinct identity, with its own civic institutions, its own newspapers, and its own version of the rich mutual aid society tradition that defined Tampa's Latin community. The Centro Español of West Tampa was a branch of its Ybor counterpart, providing dues-paying members with health care, entertainment, and social activities. La Unión, an Afro-Cuban mutual aid society founded in West Tampa by Juan Franco, merged in 1904 with the Martí-Maceo Society of Ybor City to form La Unión Martí-Maceo, which became one of the most important institutions in the Afro-Cuban community.

The neighborhood produced its own civic firsts. The West Tampa Free Public Library opened on Howard Avenue in 1914, funded by a $17,500 grant from Andrew Carnegie. It was the first public library in Hillsborough County. The Neo-Classical Revival brick building still stands today, restored and expanded in 2004 and still in use, a hundred and ten years after it first opened its doors.

Local kids in West Tampa developed their own identity too. While their counterparts in Ybor were called cangrejos — "crabs" — for their connection to the crabbing industry, West Tampa's Afro-Cuban children were known as caimanos, "alligators," because they caught and sold baby alligators to tourists.

Annexation and Decline

By the early 1920s, West Tampa was a thriving independent city with its own police department, its own elected officials, and tax revenue the city of Tampa wanted badly. After negotiations and political maneuvering, Tampa annexed West Tampa effective at midnight on December 31, 1924, with the formal date often given as 1925. The annexation roughly doubled Tampa's size and population. West Tampa's police force was absorbed into the Tampa Police Department. The independent city of West Tampa, after thirty years, ceased to exist.

The decade that followed was brutal for both cigar towns. The Great Depression cratered worldwide demand for fine hand-rolled cigars. A devastating 1931 cigar workers' strike ended the tradition of the lectores in the factories. Mechanization replaced the highly paid hand rollers with machines and lower-skilled operators. The 1962 U.S. embargo on Cuban goods cut off the supply of Havana tobacco that had defined Tampa cigars for seventy-five years.

But while Ybor City emptied out almost completely after World War II, West Tampa held on. Its economy had always been more diversified, and its housing stock was mostly modest single-family homes rather than the dense workers' cottages of Ybor. Many former Ybor residents actually moved to West Tampa during the post-war years, making it the largest predominantly Latin neighborhood in the city. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a fresh wave of Cuban immigrants fleeing Castro's revolution settled in West Tampa, finding work in industries far beyond the dwindling cigar trade.

What Remains

In the 1970s, the construction of Interstate 275 cut directly through West Tampa, severing neighborhoods and accelerating the decline that affected so many American urban centers in that era. Poverty and disinvestment took hold. But West Tampa never lost its identity.

Most of the great brick cigar factories still stand. None roll cigars at industrial scale anymore — Oliva Tobacco Company, operating out of the old Garcia y Vega building, is one of the last commercial holdouts — but the buildings have been adapted: offices, lofts, event spaces, and small artisan cigar shops where Cuban masters still roll by hand. The business district along Howard and Main remains active. The Carnegie library is still open.

Colombian, Cuban, and Puerto Rican restaurants and markets line Columbus Drive, Armenia Avenue, and Tampa Bay Boulevard, continuing a Latin culinary tradition that's now well into its second century.

Beginning in the 2000s, restoration and new construction returned. After stalling during the Great Recession, redevelopment resumed with new apartments, the renovation of Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park, and a wave of investment that has reintroduced West Tampa to a generation of Tampans who only knew Ybor.

The neighborhood's claim to the "Cigar City" title isn't really about competing with Ybor. It's about remembering that Tampa's cigar legacy was always bigger than one neighborhood. For thirty years, West Tampa was its own city — Florida's fifth-largest, a beacon for Cuban and Spanish immigrants, and home to more cigar factories than almost anywhere on earth. The other Cigar City was, in its way, the more remarkable one.