Un Viajador en Ybor: Wandering Tampa’s Historic Latin Quarter
Posted on 29. Dec, 2009 by Cody Bond in Culture
The lights are dim inside the King Corona cigar shop. It’s nearly midnight, and after two pints of Guinness and a glass of cabernet, I’m barely halfway through my cigar. It keeps burning itself out in the ashtray. The bartender has polished all the glasses and is working on the tables. I buy a copy of La Gaceta—“The nation’s only tri-lingual newspaper,” printed right here in Tampa—fold it under my arm, clench my stogy between my teeth and walk to the door.
I’m chasing ghosts in Ybor City.
Outside the rain has finally quit. Plastic beads hang, dripping from the palm trees and window bars. The streetlights glow up and down Seventh Avenue, but there’s hardly a soul around.
A train screeches by across the parking lot. There’s a ragged man in sweatpants pulling cigarette butts from a garbage can. He pops his head up as I walk by.
“Fumar!” he says eagerly. “ Fumar!”
My Spanish is less than proficient—terrible, in fact—but I gather from his gesturing hands that he wants my cigar. I’m bored with it anyway, so I hand it over.
“Gracias,” he says and dives back into the garbage.
They call this street “La Setima”—a throwback to the days when it was lined with cigar factories and filled with bustling Cuban, Spanish and Italian immigrants. It runs right through the heart of Ybor, lined with bars and restaurants, just northeast of downtown Tampa.
Rambling around, I meet mostly beggars. A young guy in a baseball cap hands me a piece of paper on which he’s scribbled the following in blue marker:
“I am deaf. I am trying to get $8 for a bus ticket back to Orlando where my mother was just shot and killed.”
I give him $8 and a smile and feel pretty good about myself. Not two minutes later, on the very same block, I meet another guy with another crumpled note written in the same blue marker:
“I am mute. I was attacked last night, and all my money was stolen. I am trying to get $32 for a bus ticket to Orlando.”
“Sorry, man,” I say, handing him back his bullshit note, “I’ve done my good deed for the night.”
He looks crestfallen.
“I’m trying to get home,” he says. “Just wanna get home.”
“I thought you were mute,” I say.
I meet Gerald and David outside the Green Iguana. We share a table and a round of PBRs. David says little, looks antsy and keeps getting up to go inside. Gerald smokes Stampedes at a suicidal rate—he’ll finish one, snuff it, cough vigorously and light another. He speaks in whispers, but amicably and at length. He tells me he was once bitten by a brown recluse while taking a piss alongside the Autobahn in 1989. I hesitate to ask where he was bitten, but he eventually shows me the scar on his ankle. Nearly cost him his leg, he says. David insists it’s time to go, so I shake hands with them both and watch them walk away.
It’s quiet out. Too many doors are shut; too many signs have gone dim. I splash through puddles, back and forth across the street, reading the names stamped in the sidewalk pavers. The power lines hum overhead.
Where the hell is the salsa music? The trumpets and the drums? I expected the streets to be filled with beautiful, dark-haired women all dancing and throbbing and glistening with sweat. Hot red lights and flowing liquor. Skirts spinning madly. Pouting lips and enticing eyes.
But I see none of that. So I keep drinking. It’s the only thing to do.
The wall clock in the kitchen wakes me around 9 a.m. It won’t be ignored. I curse it passionately and throw off the sheets.
Ah, hotel mornings. Clothes heaped on a strange floor. There’s a scrap of paper on the nightstand:
“James Joyce Irish Pub—green carpet with duct tape on seams—dozen meatheads at bar in Harley shirts—biceps!—crappy fake fireplace with lights and fan-blown paper flames—girlfriends screaming—empty bottles of Jameson and copper tea kettles on shelves—water pipes and wires—”
“Crowbar—$5 liters—DJs, kids break-dancing—PBR labels flying from ceiling—pool game with Max and Christina—stomach hurts—”
Some of this sounds familiar. At least I took notes. My head aches a little, but the day is young and bright, so I shower and pack and turn in my key.
Back in Ybor, I find the Parque Amigos de Jose Marti, a monument to the great martyr of Cuban independence. It was here among the cigar workers that Marti drummed up support for the Cuban Revolutionary Party in the 1890s. The park sits in the sunshine on the corner of 13th Street and Eighth Avenue, across from old Ybor Square. A gleaming white statue of Marti stands in the center, hand outstretched, between the Cuban and American flags. It’s not quite noon, but the gate is locked, so I move on.
A little ways north, just past I-4, the neighborhood is crumbling. I walk past tiny apartments sitting side-by-side on lonely streets. Front doors are boarded up. There are pictures of Che Guevara in the windows and chain-link fences surrounding it all. Everywhere the paint is peeling.
Down on Eighth Avenue, not six blocks away, the tourists are out in full force. They waddle off the trolley in their flip flops and straw hats, stretching the seams of their salsa-stained Capri pants and pastel guayabera shirts. They lick ice cream cones in the Centro Ybor courtyard and squeeze their Winnebagos through the narrow streets.
I grab a cup of coffee at a place called The Bunker then round the corner to the Museum Store and buy a copy of the Selected Writings of Jose Marti. Centennial Park lies across the street, empty and inviting. I take a walk around, crunching the acorns beneath my feet, and sit down on the steps to read.
A favorite passage from one of Marti’s notebooks:
To write: The Supreme Moments: (of my life, of The Life of a Man: the little that is remembered, like the peaks of a mountain: the hours that count.)
There’s something familiar about Ybor. Something that lingers in the cobblestone streets. It’s not the feeling you get in an ancient city. Nothing mythical or grand. It’s a haunting sensation—a closeness. Like an empty seat that’s still warm. You have to wonder who just left.
