Ybor City Museum State Park

State park museum in a historic brick building telling the story of Tampa's cigar-making immigrant community

The Ybor City Museum State Park occupies a former bakery building on 9th Avenue that was built in 1896 to supply bread to the cigar workers. The museum tells the history of the neighbourhood from its founding by Vicente Martinez-Ybor in 1885 through the peak of the cigar industry and its decline after the 1930s.

The collection covers the remarkable cultural diversity of Ybor City — Cuban, Spanish, Italian, German, and Jewish immigrants who created separate but overlapping communities within a few blocks of each other. The social clubs (the Centro Español, the Círculo Cubano, L'Unione Italiana) that provided mutual aid, healthcare, and cultural life to each community are covered in detail, with original documents and artefacts.

Adjacent to the museum is a restored casita (worker's cottage) from the 1890s, giving a sense of how the cigar workers lived. The grounds are pleasant and the entrance fee is minimal. The museum is the best starting point for understanding Ybor City before exploring the neighbourhood itself.

things to do museum ybor city
A story
At the height of the cigar industry in the early 1900s, the factories employed *lectores* — professional readers who sat on elevated platforms and read aloud to the workers for hours each day. The workers paid the lectores out of their own wages and voted each week on what should be read: newspapers, political pamphlets, and novels by Zola, Tolstoy, and Cervantes were all standard fare. The tradition was so politically influential that the Florida state government eventually banned the lectores, fearing their role in organising labour.

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