Transcription
In 1880, the United States Census counted 720 people living in Tampa, Florida. That number was down from the decade before. The town had no railroad. It had no industry. It had yellow fever so regularly that entire seasons passed without a ship willing to dock there.
11 years earlier, in 1869, the residents of Tampa had done something almost unheard of in American civic life. They voted to dissolve their own city government. They simply gave up.
And yet within 20 years of that census, within the span of a single generation, Tampa would be one of the largest, wealthiest, and most cosmopolitan cities in the American South, producing more handrolled cigars than Havana, hosting the command staff of a foreign war, and building a hotel so grand that it remains to this day the most improbable structure ever erected in the state of Florida. The silver Moorish minarets of that hotel still catch the Gulf light every morning. 13 of them glinting above the Hillsboro River like a hallucination someone forgot to take down. They are the signature image of a city that should not exist.
To understand how impossible Tampa's rise was, you have to understand how thoroughly it had failed before it began. The area had been inhabited for thousands of years by the Tocobaga and Kousa peoples who fished the bay and built shell mounds along its shores. But European contact, beginning with Ponce de León in 1513 and Hernando De Soto, who sailed into Tampa Bay in 1539 searching for gold, brought diseases that devastated those populations. By the mid-1600s, the Tampa Bay area was essentially depopulated.
When the United States acquired Florida from Spain in 1821, the region was still largely empty. The army established Fort Brooke in 1824 at the mouth of the Hillsboro River, not because anyone wanted to be there, but because they needed a place to keep watch on the Seminoles, who had been forcibly relocated to the interior. What followed was three decades of intermittent warfare, the Seminole Wars, punctuated by outbreaks of yellow fever that could empty the settlement for weeks at a time. A devastating hurricane in September 1848 damaged or destroyed nearly every structure in town, including most of the fort. The army nearly abandoned the post entirely, and it took lobbying in Washington to keep it open.
Florida became a state in 1845, and Tampa was incorporated as the village of Tampa in 1849 with a population of 185 civilians, not counting soldiers. Its first mayor, Judge Joseph Lancaster, took office in 1856. Then the Civil War came and made everything worse. The war, the blockade, the federal occupation, and Reconstruction left Tampa economically shattered. There was no cotton economy to rebuild, no plantation wealth to fall back on. The roads were wrecked. The population dwindled. And in 1869, with conditions so bad that basic municipal services had become a fiction, the residents voted to unincorporate.
For several years, Tampa effectively had no government. It reincorporated in 1872, but the damage was done. The 1870 census recorded 796 people. The 1880 census recorded 720. The town was shrinking. Fort Brooke, the only reason Tampa existed in the first place, was decommissioned in 1883. Except for two rusted cannons later fished out of the river and displayed on a college campus, every trace of it is gone. In 1883, Tampa was a dying settlement on a beautiful bay that nobody wanted, surrounded by swamp, sand, and mosquitoes. No rational investor would have put a dollar into it.
And then within the space of roughly two years, three completely unrelated forces converged on this dying village and turned it into a city. This convergence is the central event of Tampa's history. And there is nothing quite like it in the story of any other American city. Nothing about it was planned. Nothing about it was coordinated. A railroad magnet from Connecticut who had never lived in Florida; a 67-year-old cigar manufacturer fleeing political persecution in Cuba who had already been chased out of two previous cities; and a geological deposit of fossilized prehistoric bones buried beneath the sandy soil of central Florida. These three forces happened to arrive at this unremarkable point on the Gulf Coast at almost the same moment. Any one of them alone might have given Tampa a modest boost. The three together, arriving within a two-year window, created a transformation so rapid that there is no real precedent for it in American urban history. The odds against it are difficult to calculate because no one was calculating. It simply happened.
The first force was Henry Bradley Plant. Plant had made his fortune during and after the Civil War, buying up broken Southern railroad lines at distressed prices and consolidating them into what became known as the Plant System, a network of railroads, steamship lines, and hotels stretching across the Southeast. By the early 1880s, Plant was looking for a terminus for his rail network on the Gulf Coast, a place where trains from the north could connect with steamships to Cuba, Jamaica, and the Caribbean. Tampa's deep natural harbor made geographic sense, even if nothing else about the town did. In 1884, Plant extended his railroad to the Hillsboro River. The first train rolled into Tampa that year, and for the first time in its history, the settlement was connected to the outside world by something faster than a horse or a schooner.
The second force was phosphate. In 1881, an army engineer named Captain J. Francis LeBaron discovered phosphate deposits while surveying the Peace River southeast of Tampa. By 1883, commercial mining had begun in earnest in what became known as the Bone Valley, named for the fossilized bones of prehistoric creatures embedded in the soil. The deposits were staggeringly rich, among the most economically accessible in the world. Phosphate was the essential ingredient in agricultural fertilizer, and as the global agricultural economy industrialized, the world's appetite for it was enormous and growing. By the 1890s, Florida had displaced South Carolina as America's leading phosphate producer, and Port Tampa became a major export terminal with narrow-gauge rail lines connecting mines in Polk and Hillsborough counties to loading facilities on the bay. Ships carried Florida phosphate to ports in Europe, Asia, and South America. The mining itself was brutal: 12-hour shifts in open pits 30 feet deep. Men swinging picks in knee-deep slurry under armed guards on horseback, paid roughly $2 a day, with regular dynamite accidents that maimed or killed workers. But the money it generated was transformative. It brought rail infrastructure, shipping investment, banking capital, and a class of speculators and entrepreneurs to the Tampa Bay region almost overnight. The phosphate didn't make Tampa glamorous, but it made Tampa solvent. It was the unglamorous foundation on which everything else could be built.
The third force, and ultimately the most consequential, was a 67-year-old Spaniard named Vicente Martínez Ybor. Born in Valencia in 1818, Ybor had moved to Cuba as a teenager, learned the cigar business, and built a successful factory in Havana, producing his Prince of Wales brand. He was a supporter of Cuban independence, which put him at odds with the Spanish colonial government. When the authorities issued a warrant for his arrest, he fled to Key West with his family and restarted his operation there. But Key West had its own problems: constant labor unrest, limited land for expansion, and difficult shipping connections to northern markets. Ybor needed somewhere else. In October 1885, he contracted with the Tampa Board of Trade to relocate his entire manufacturing operation to a 40-acre tract of undeveloped land northeast of Tampa's tiny downtown. Tampa's population at the time was under 5,000. Ybor was not joining a city. He was building one.
The speed of what followed is almost disorienting. Before his permanent brick factory was even finished, Ybor had temporary wooden shanties erected so cigar production could begin immediately. The first cigars were rolled in Tampa in April 1886. By December of that year, his factory was producing 900,000 handrolled cigars per month. But Ybor did not merely build a factory. He built a community. His company constructed casitas, small houses that workers could purchase at cost through payroll deductions. He laid out streets, established a streetcar line to connect his settlement to downtown Tampa, opened a brewery, a hotel, an ice factory, and a gas company. He offered discounts on land and free buildings to other cigar manufacturers who agreed to create a minimum number of jobs, and they came. In the summer of 1886, a massive fire in Key West destroyed much of that town and sent hundreds of Cuban and Spanish cigar workers to Tampa looking for work. Other manufacturers followed Ybor's lead. Ignacio Haya built his own factory nearby, and within a few years, the area that became known as Ybor City was lined with three-story brick cigar factories, each one employing hundreds.
The political energy of the place was extraordinary. In 1893, José Martí, the revolutionary writer and organizer who would become Cuba's national hero, stood on the front steps of Ybor's factory and delivered a speech to the Cuban workers, rallying them to the cause of independence. The money that funded Cuba's revolution against Spain came in no small part from the pockets of cigar workers in Tampa, Florida.
The workforce that filled these factories created something unlike anything else in the American South. Cubans, Spaniards, Italians, and a smaller number of Eastern European Jewish merchants and Romanian immigrants formed a multiethnic, multilingual community in a region where such mixing was essentially unheard of. They established mutual aid societies: the Centro Español, the Centro Asturiano, the L'Unione Italiana, the Círculo Cubano, each one providing healthcare, insurance, education, and social life to its members. At a time when the government provided none of these things, Seventh Avenue, the main commercial strip through Ybor City, was lined with restaurants, bakeries, boarding houses, and social clubs where Spanish, Italian, and English were spoken interchangeably. La Gaceta, a tri-lingual newspaper, was founded to serve this community. It is still published today.
But the most remarkable institution in Ybor City's cigar factories was the lector. The lector was a reader, a man hired by the workers themselves, each contributing about 25 cents a week, to stand on a raised wooden platform on the factory floor and read aloud while they worked. Picture the scene: a wide, sunlit room, wooden workbenches set close together. As many as 400 men and women seated in rows, their fingers moving with practiced speed, selecting a wrapper leaf, stretching it, cutting it, rolling the filler into a binder, shaping it, pressing it, while above them, from a platform that resembled nothing so much as a pulpit, a man in a suit read. In the morning, he read the news from local papers, but also from Havana, Madrid, and New York. In the afternoon, he turned to literature. Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables* was so popular among the cigar workers that they reportedly voted to name a cigar brand after the novel's protagonist. Alexandre Dumas was a favorite. So was Cervantes. The lectors were typically educated men from Havana, and their auditions were public affairs. Factory committees selected them based on their pronunciation, dramatic ability, and range of knowledge. The auditions lasted about 10 minutes, and the judgment was exacting. A lector needed not just literacy, but the voice of an actor and the judgment of an editor. A good one could earn as much as $100 a week at a time when a skilled cigar roller earned perhaps $15 or $20, making the lector among the highest-paid people in the entire industry. 400 workers contributing a quarter each added up to $100, and the workers considered it money well spent.
The effect on the workforce was extraordinary. Cigar workers in Ybor City, many of them illiterate when they arrived, became among the most politically informed and culturally engaged laborers in America. They debated philosophy over their lunch breaks. They discussed international politics at the mutual aid societies in the evening. One son of a factory worker later said that the lectors made the cigar makers more informed than most other people in Tampa.
The numbers tell the rest. Tampa's population leapt from 720 in 1880 to 5,532 in 1890, a growth rate of nearly 670% in a single decade. By 1900, it had reached 15,839. By 1910, 37,782. Over 10,000 immigrants lived in Ybor City alone by the turn of the century. A second cigar manufacturing suburb, West Tampa, was founded a few miles away and drew several thousand more Cuban workers. Between them, these two Latin communities generated the tax revenue, the consumer demand, and the economic base that transformed Tampa from a settlement into a city. At its peak, the cigar industry operated over 200 factories in and around Tampa, employing some 12,000 workers who handrolled roughly 500 million cigars a year. More cigars were being made with Cuban tobacco in Tampa than in Cuba itself. The city earned a name that would stick for decades: the Cigar Capital of the World.
While all of this was happening on the east side of the Hillsboro River, Henry Plant was doing something astonishing on the west side. Having brought the railroad to Tampa, he now needed a reason for wealthy Northerners to ride it. His rival, Henry Flagler, had built the wildly successful Hotel Ponce de León in St. Augustine on the Atlantic coast, and Plant wanted his own palace on the Gulf. His investors refused to fund it. They looked at Tampa, a town that had dissolved its own government 15 years earlier, and declined. So Plant decided to build it himself. He spent $2.5 million of his own money on construction and another $500,000 on furnishings, an amount equivalent to roughly $75 million today. The architect was J. A. Wood, and the style was Moorish Revival. A sprawling, fantastical structure that covered 6 acres, stretched a quarter-mile in length, and was topped by those 13 silver minarets and onion domes that have defined the Tampa skyline ever since.
The Tampa Bay Hotel opened on February 5th, 1891, to the kind of fanfare usually reserved for world's fairs. Newspapers described it as a vision of turrets, domes, and minarets glistening in the sun. Its 511 rooms were among the first in Florida to have full electricity and telephones. It had two of the state's first passenger elevators. It was advertised as fireproof, its floors reinforced with steel rails and poured concrete. The furnishings were hand-selected by Plant and his wife, Margaret, during buying trips across Europe: Venetian mirrors, French porcelain, exotic sculptures, and furniture that filled rooms designed for a degree of luxury that Tampa had never imagined. The grounds spread over 150 acres and included a golf course, tennis courts, a heated swimming pool, a casino theater seating 2,000, stables, a racetrack, conservatories filled with rare plants from around the world, and a boathouse from which guests could board a Plant System steamship for Havana. A spur of the railroad ran directly to the hotel's front entrance, so guests could step off the train and into the lobby without touching the Florida mud.
Here is the detail that reveals the most about Henry Plant's thinking: The Tampa Bay Hotel never made money. It was open only from December to April, and operating costs consistently exceeded revenue. Plant's profit came from the train tickets, the passengers who rode his railroad south to reach the hotel, and the freight that moved through the port his railroad had made viable. The hotel was a loss leader of breathtaking proportions. He built a palace to justify a railroad, and in doing so, he gave a backwater fishing village the most conspicuous piece of architecture between New Orleans and Miami.
The hotel's most dramatic chapter came in 1898 when the Spanish-American War transformed Tampa overnight. Because of its proximity to Cuba, just 90 miles across the Florida Straits, Tampa was chosen as the primary staging ground for American troops bound for the war. Over 30,000 soldiers descended on the city in the spring of 1898, more than doubling its civilian population in a matter of weeks. Tampa had exactly one railroad line. It had no infrastructure for a military mobilization of this scale. Troops camped in fields, sweltered in wool uniforms through the Florida summer, and drank water of uncertain quality while malaria and yellow fever thinned their ranks before they ever reached Cuba. But in the middle of this chaos, the Tampa Bay Hotel became the headquarters for the military command, housing Generals William Shafter and Nelson Miles and their staffs in rooms furnished with Venetian glass and French antiques. The contrast was surreal. Reporters noted that the men planning an invasion ate from china in a dining room with chandeliers while enlisted soldiers slept in the dirt a few hundred yards away. Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and his First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, the Rough Riders, roughly a thousand men, were camped on the hotel's grounds, and Roosevelt and his wife Edith shared a final visit in its elegant rooms before the regiment shipped out. War correspondents, including the novelist and journalist Richard Harding Davis, filed their dispatches from the hotel's verandas. Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, was there for a few months. In the spring of 1898, the Tampa Bay Hotel was the nerve center of American military power, and Tampa was on the front page of every newspaper in the country.
The troops embarked from Port Tampa on June 8th, 1898, 16,000 men crowding onto transports. The war lasted 10 weeks. Roosevelt came home a national hero and would be president within three years. Tampa went back to making cigars. But that brief burst of national attention mattered. Investors who had never heard of Tampa now knew where it was. Developers began to take an interest.
And in the early years of the new century, Tampa did something that no one would have predicted for a city that had barely existed two decades earlier. It became a place where the future was being invented. On New Year's Day 1914, a crowd of some 3,000 people gathered at the municipal pier in St. Petersburg across the bay. At 10:00 in the morning, a 24-year-old pilot named Anthony Jannus climbed into a wood and canvas Benoist Type XIV flying boat, accompanied by Abram Pheil, the former mayor of St. Petersburg, who had paid $400 at auction for the privilege of being the world's first paying airline passenger. The little biplane slid down a greased wooden ramp into Tampa Bay, taxied into open water, and lifted into the sky. 23 minutes later, Jannus landed at the mouth of the Hillsboro River in downtown Tampa. It was the first scheduled commercial airline flight in human history. One-way fare was $5. Every seat was a window seat because there was only one seat, and it was outdoors. The St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line operated for three months, carried just over 1,200 passengers, and then folded when the city subsidy ran out. Jannus went to Russia in 1916 to train military pilots for the Czar and was killed when his plane crashed into the Black Sea. He was 27. The airline that started modern commercial aviation lasted 90 days, covered 11,000 miles, and vanished. The global industry it preceded carried 4.5 billion passengers in 2019 alone.
By the early 1920s, Tampa was a boom town in every sense. The cigar industry was at its zenith. The port was shipping phosphate around the world. Major League Baseball teams had begun using Tampa for spring training. The Chicago Cubs played on Plant Field on the grounds of the old Tampa Bay Hotel as early as 1913. The annual Gasparilla Pirate Festival, first held in 1904, had become a citywide celebration. Franklin Street, the first street in town to be paved, to have sidewalks, and to have electric lights, had become the commercial heart of downtown, lined with department stores like Maas Brothers and Wolf Brothers, five-and-dimes like McCrory's and Woolworth's, restaurants, theaters, and banks. Twin streetcars ran down its center. The photographs from this era show a street that could belong to any prosperous American city: crowded sidewalks, well-dressed shoppers, automobiles mixing with horse-drawn carts, awnings, and signage in English and Spanish.
The Florida land boom of the mid-1920s hit Tampa like it hit every coastal city in the state, but Tampa produced its own singular act of real estate audacity. David Paul Davis was a Tampa native, born in 1885 in Green Cove Springs, who had made money in the early stages of the Miami boom. He returned to Tampa in 1924 with an idea that most people considered insane. At the mouth of the Hillsboro River, just south of downtown, sat two small, swampy islands known as Little Grassy Key and Big Grassy Key. They were mudflats, essentially useless, flooded at high tide, home to nothing but marsh grass and mosquitoes. Davis proposed to dredge sand from the bottom of Tampa Bay, fill and merge the islands, and create roughly 875 acres of brand-new land on which he would build an exclusive residential community in the Mediterranean Revival style. He bought the rights from the city for $350,000. When the first lots went on sale in October 1924, more than 300 of them sold on opening day for a total exceeding $1.5 million. Davis built his own home on the island, a Mediterranean Revival house at 116 West Davis Boulevard that cost $40,000, with stucco walls, a red tile roof, and wrought iron details. He built streets, a golf course, a yacht basin, and planned a luxury hotel. He was, for a brief, dazzling moment, wildly rich and nationally famous.
Then the Florida land boom collapsed. A catastrophic hurricane struck Miami in September 1926, shattering investor confidence across the state. Davis sold his Tampa development in August 1926 to stay ahead of his debts. Two months later, on October 12th, he boarded a luxury liner bound for Europe, the Majestic, a sister ship of the Titanic and at that time the largest ship in the world. During the crossing, he went overboard and drowned. Whether it was suicide, an accident, or something else has never been definitively established. He was 41 years old. Davis Islands is still there. It remains one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Tampa.
That same month, October 1926, the Tampa Theatre opened its doors at 711 North Franklin Street. Designed by the theater architect John Eberson and built by Paramount Pictures at a cost of $1.2 million, it was one of the most elaborate movie palaces in America. Eberson specialized in what he called the "atmospheric" style: interiors designed to make the audience feel as though they were sitting in an outdoor courtyard beneath a real night sky. The Tampa Theatre's auditorium was decorated to resemble a Mediterranean garden with old-world statuary, Spanish tile rooftops, climbing vines, exotic plaster birds, and gargoyles peering down from balconies. The ceiling was painted to look like a twilight sky, and a machine produced artificial clouds that drifted slowly across it while stars twinkled overhead. Tickets to opening night sold out in two hours. For 25 cents, a working person could step off the sunbaked concrete of Franklin Street into a darkened courtyard in Seville and sit in man-made air. It was the first air-conditioned commercial building in Tampa, while a Wurlitzer organ played the soundtrack to a silent film. Eberson later wrote that the Tampa Theatre was his favorite of the roughly 100 atmospheric theaters he designed. It survives today as the most intact example of his work in the world.
But by the time the Tampa Theatre opened, the forces that had built the city were already beginning to fray. The Florida land boom collapsed that same year. The Great Depression followed in 1929 and hit Tampa hard. The cigar industry, which had seemed invincible, was under assault from multiple directions at once. Machine-made cigars were cheaper to produce and were gaining market share. A machine could do in minutes what a skilled tabacalero spent an hour perfecting, and most consumers could not tell the difference or did not care. Cigarettes, cheaper still, far easier to smoke, and increasingly fashionable, were becoming the dominant tobacco product in America. When American men and women went off to fight in World War II, the War Department furnished them cigarettes with their rations. By the time those soldiers came home, a generation was hooked on the cheaper product, and the premium cigar market that had sustained Ybor City for half a century was in structural decline. Demand for handrolled cigars was falling, and with it, the economic rationale for employing 12,000 people to roll them by hand.
And then there was the matter of the lectors. The reading tradition that had made Ybor City's workers so remarkably informed had also made them remarkably political. The lectors increasingly read radical publications: socialist and anarchist tracts, labor newspapers, calls for collective action. The workers, educated and organized, launched a series of major strikes. The most significant came in November 1931. The cigar manufacturers had been trying to curtail the lectors for years, arguing that the reading material was inciting insubordination. When the strike ended in December, the manufacturers won. The lectors were banned from the factory floors. The podiums where educated men from Havana had read Victor Hugo and José Martí to rooms of 400 workers were dismantled and carried away. The institution that had made cigar workers in a Florida factory town more broadly informed than most college graduates in the country was finished. It had lasted 45 years. The lectors' banishment was not merely a labor dispute. It was the symbolic end of an era. Without the reading tradition, the factories lost something essential to their identity. Without the factories, Ybor City lost its reason for being.
The decline was not sudden. It took decades. But the trajectory was set. The Depression reduced demand. Mechanization replaced skilled hands. The cigarette, powered by wartime rations that hooked an entire generation of American soldiers, hollowed out the premium cigar market. One by one, the great brick factories on Seventh Avenue went dark.
As the cigar industry dimmed, a shadow economy took its place. Tampa had always had an undercurrent of vice. Bolita, a Cuban-style numbers game played with a hundred small balls of wood or ivory, had been a fixture of Ybor City since the early 1900s. But in the Prohibition era and the decades that followed, organized crime became a defining feature of the city. Charlie McKay Wall, born in 1880 to one of Tampa's most prominent Anglo families (his father a physician who had pioneered yellow fever research, his mother related to the McKay and Lykes dynasties), became the improbable kingpin of Tampa's underworld. Known as "the White Shadow," Wall ran bolita operations, bootlegging, and prostitution from Ybor City, bribing police and elected officials with a brazenness that was almost civic in its openness. His chief rival was the Sicilian-born Ignacio Antinori, and the war between their organizations produced a period known locally as the "Era of Blood," more than 50 gangland killings and attempted assassinations between the 1920s and the 1950s. Antinori was shot to death in October 1940. The Trafficante family, first Santo Sr., then his son Santo Jr., gradually assumed control. Santo Trafficante Jr. built one of the most powerful Mafia families in America and famously never spent a night in an American jail. In 1950, when Senator Estes Kefauver's traveling organized crime hearings arrived in Tampa, the Trafficantes avoided testimony by temporarily relocating to Cuba. Charlie Wall, aging and embittered, made the mistake of agreeing to testify. On the morning of April 18th, 1955, he was found in his pajamas on his bedroom floor. His throat had been cut. His murder has never been solved.
The post-war decades brought Tampa what they brought most American cities: suburban expansion, automobile infrastructure, and the slow death of downtown. Families moved to new subdivisions in North Tampa and South Hillsborough County. Shopping malls, Westshore Plaza, Tampa Bay Center, pulled retail dollars away from Franklin Street. In the 1970s, city leaders tried to save the street by closing a five-block stretch to automobile traffic and converting it into a brick-paved pedestrian mall, the same strategy that failed in dozens of American downtowns during those years. It failed in Tampa, too. Without cars passing by, the remaining stores lost visibility. Maas Brothers' flagship department store closed in 1991. The Woolworths went dark in 1992. The street that had been the commercial center of a booming city was, by the end of the 20th century, largely empty.
Ybor City fared worse. By the 1960s, the cigar factories were mostly closed. The casitas were deteriorating, and the mutual aid societies were struggling to maintain their grand buildings. Of the more than 200 cigar factories that had operated at the industry's peak, only a handful were still standing. Then came the highway. Interstate 4, routed directly through the neighborhood in the 1960s, demolished entire blocks of historic structures and severed the district from the city it had helped build. The expressway cut Ybor City off from downtown Tampa as decisively as any wall could have. Urban renewal programs in the 1960s and 1970s tore down more. What had been one of the most vibrant, most diverse, most intellectually alive working-class neighborhoods in America became a place people drove through on the way to somewhere else. The factories that remained standing were converted into nightclubs, office space, and, in one case, a chain Italian restaurant. The brick walls where cigar rollers had once worked beneath the voice of a lector reading Cervantes were repainted and fitted with neon.
But not everything was lost. The Tampa Theatre survived, donated to the city in 1973 when its owners could no longer operate it commercially. It was restored and today operates as a nonprofit movie palace. J.C. Newman, a cigar company founded in 1895 in Cleveland, Ohio, moved its operations to Tampa in 1954 and continues to make cigars by hand in its factory on 16th Street, the last working cigar factory in Ybor City. In 2023, the company opened a museum in its century-old building and has built a new handmade cigar factory with a reconstructed lector's platform. The lector has returned, at least on occasion, and the minarets are still there.
Henry Plant's Tampa Bay Hotel, that $3 million Moorish hallucination built for a town of 720 people, never did make money as a hotel. It closed during the Depression in 1930. In 1933, the city of Tampa acquired the building and leased it to what is now the University of Tampa, which renamed it Plant Hall. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1972. The Henry B. Plant Museum occupies the south wing, its rooms still furnished with the original Venetian mirrors and French porcelain that Margaret Plant selected during her European shopping trips in the 1890s. The Edison carbon-filament light bulbs that illuminated those rooms when the hotel opened in 1891 are the only lights used in the museum today. Students at the university walk past those silver minarets every morning on their way to class, most of them knowing only vaguely, if at all, that a Connecticut railroad baron once built the most expensive hotel in Florida for a city that barely existed, wagering that if you construct the palace, the kingdom will materialize around it. He was right.
As it turned out, the kingdom did materialize. Ybor's cigar workers, and Plant's railroad, and the phosphate shippers, and the soldiers of the Spanish-American War, and a pilot in a canvas biplane, and a developer who manufactured land from mud, and a theater architect who put clouds inside a building. They all materialized one after another, each one more improbable than the last. Tampa went from 720 people to over 100,000 in 50 years. It went from a village that had abolished its own government to the Cigar Capital of the World, the birthplace of commercial aviation, and the most audaciously built city on the Gulf Coast.
Today, the cigar factories are mostly restaurants and galleries. Seventh Avenue in Ybor City is a nightlife district. Davis Islands is home to Tampa General Hospital and some of the most expensive real estate in Florida. Franklin Street is beginning to fill in again, new restaurants, new bars, new apartment towers rising around the old McCrory Building and the Carlile Library. The Tampa Bay Hotel is a university. The Hillsboro River still curves past Plant Hall and out into the bay. And on certain mornings, when the light comes in low over the water, those silver minarets catch it the same way they did in 1891, when there was almost no city here at all. Just a bet, extravagant, irrational, magnificent, that this particular stretch of swamp and sun and deep harbor water was worth building something impossible on. One working cigar factory still stands on 16th Street. Inside, a man occasionally climbs a wooden platform, opens a book, and begins to read.