The Ybor Factory Building is a historic site in Tampa, Florida, United States. The main factory and its surrounding support buildings cover an entire city block between 8th Avenue and 9th Avenues and 13th and 14th Streets in the Ybor City Historic District section of the Ybor City neighborhood.
The factory was built in 1886 by Vicente Martinez-Ybor as he moved the production of his PrÃncipe de Gales ("Prince of Wales") cigar line from Key West to the new company town he founded just northeast of Tampa in 1885. The headquarters of Ybor's holding company was directly across 9th Ave. in the El Pasaje building, which was constructed at about the same time.
The three-story structure was the first brick cigar factory in Tampa and the largest cigar factory in the world at the time. Over the next few decades, skilled tabaqueros (cigar makers) would roll hundreds of millions of cigars on wooden workbenches set close together in the building's wide, sunlit rolling rooms.
After Ybor died in 1896, the building was owned by a succession of other cigar manufacturers and continued to be a productive cigar factory until after World War II, when the industry (and Ybor City in general) entered a long period of decline.
Over the next few decades, the buildings were vacant, then were used as gallery and studio space for artists, then converted to a festival marketplace called Ybor Square in the mid-1970s. In 2002, the buildings were converted to office space with the exception of a franchise of the Spaghetti Warehouse restaurant, which is still located in the former tobacco storage warehouse.
In 2010, the entire complex was purchased by the Church of Scientology, reportedly to consolidate a smaller location in Ybor City with another in West Tampa.
The Ybor Factory building was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places on November 15, 1972.
Famous quotes containing the words factory and/or building:
“If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)
“And when discipline is concerned, the parent who has to make it to the end of an eighteen-hour day—who works at a job and then takes on a second shift with the kids every night—is much more likely to adopt the survivor’s motto: “If it works, I’ll use it.” From this perspective, dads who are even slightly less involved and emphasize firm limits or character- building might as well be talking a foreign language. They just don’t get it.”
—Ron Taffel (20th century)