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Sicily on Seventh Avenue: The Italian Cigar Workers Who Helped Build Ybor City
In the late 1800s, Sicilian immigrants joined Cubans and Spaniards in Tampa's cigar district. They rolled tobacco, organized unions and built a mutual aid society whose red-brick clubhouse still stands. Long before Florida meant retirees and theme parks, one corner of Tampa sounded like a crossroads of the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. On the brick streets of Ybor City, you could hear Cuban Spanish, Castilian, and the dialects of a handful of hill towns in western Sicily, often in the same factory, on the same afternoon. The neighborhood was the creation of Vicente Martinez Ybor, a Spanish-born cigar manufacturer who moved his operation from Key West to a patch of scrubland east of Tampa in 1886. Other manufacturers followed, and within a few years Ybor City was turning out millions of hand-rolled cigars and drawing workers from across the Spanish-speaking world. The Italians came a little later, and mostly from one place. Historians have traced much of Tampa's Italian community to a cluster of small towns in Sicily's Agrigento province, among them Santo Stefano Quisquina, Alessandria della Rocca, Bivona and Cianciana. Many had first tried their luck elsewhere in the American South, cutting cane on sugar plantations, before word spread that the cigar factories in Tampa were hiring. They arrived as outsiders in an industry dominated by Cuban and Spanish craftsmen. Many started at the bottom, stripping tobacco leaves or running small groceries, bakeries and boarding houses that fed the factories. Over time, they worked their way onto the rolling floor and into the life of the neighborhood. A club of their own Ybor City's immigrants did not wait for anyone to take care of them. Each community built its own mutual aid society, a combination of social club, insurance plan and safety net. The Spaniards had the Centro Español and the Centro Asturiano. The Cubans had the Círculo Cubano. In 1894, the Italians founded L'Unione Italiana, the Italian Club, with 107 members and Bartolomeo Filogamo as its first president. For a small monthly due, members received sick and death benefits, and the club kept its own cemetery so that no member would be buried a stranger. By 1935, membership had grown to more than 3,000. The club's first permanent home, completed in 1911, burned in 1914. Its replacement, a three-story Renaissance Revival building designed by Tampa architect M. Leo Elliott, opened on Seventh Avenue in 1918 and is still there today, its Corinthian columns and red brick a landmark of the historic district. The reader and the strike Inside the factories, one tradition shaped the politics of everyone on the floor: the lector. Workers pooled their money to pay a reader who sat on a raised platform and read aloud for hours, newspapers in the morning, novels and political tracts in the afternoon. Italian workers absorbed the same radical ideas as their Cuban and Spanish neighbors, and Ybor City became one of the most union-minded places in the South. That solidarity came at a cost. In 1910, as thousands of cigar workers walked out in a bitter strike for union recognition, two Italian immigrants, Castenge Ficarrotta and Angelo Albano, were arrested in connection with the shooting of a factory bookkeeper. In September, a mob seized them from police custody and hanged them from a tree in West Tampa. Their involvement in the shooting was never proven, and no one was ever charged with their killing. The strike collapsed in early 1911. What remains The hand-rolled cigar industry faded through the 20th century, undone by machines, the Depression and changing tastes, and many families moved out to the suburbs. But the Italian Club endures. More than 130 years after its founding, it still hosts weddings, dances and the annual Festa Italiana, with bocce tournaments and wine in the same rooms where cigar workers once gathered to pay their dues. Ybor City is often remembered as a Cuban and Spanish story, and it is. But it is also an Italian American one: proof that the Sicilian diaspora reached not only Mulberry Street and North Beach, but a cigar town on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where it helped invent a new kind of American neighborhood.