Tampa Tribune midwinter edition supplement, 1900, Hillsborough and Manatee proclaimed by the Tribune, pages 30-31, (photo reprint): Tampa, Fla.

Courtesy, Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library System

About this photograph

Photograph Order Number

PA 4922

Negative Number

TPL 187

Date

1900

Creator

Tampa Tribune.

Publisher

Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library

Date of Photographic Print

1980 printing

Source (original item)

1 photograph : b&w ; 21 x 26 cm. +1 negative (21 x 26 cm.)

Format

JPEG2000

General Notes

Neg. no. TPL187; taken 1900.; Reprint from the Tampa Tribune, Midwinter edition, 1900.

Subjects

Tampa in the 1900s

The 1900s were Tampa's boomtown years. Ybor City was already being called the Cigar Capital of the World by 1900, and across the river, West Tampa — built up from 1892 by Hugh Macfarlane, incorporated in 1895 — kept adding factories until more than 200 of them were rolling out over a million cigars a day by 1910. Electric streetcars tied it all together: downtown, Ybor, West Tampa, Tampa Heights, all the way south to Ballast Point. Phosphate, citrus, and shipping kept the port humming, and Henry Plant's 511-room Tampa Bay Hotel was still the place to winter, even after the city bought it in 1905. And in May 1904, Tampa threw its very first Gasparilla pirate parade — on horseback. Photographs from this decade show that boomtown confidence up close — downtown commerce, the port at work, streetcars on new lines, and Tampa's first Gasparilla parades.

Sources: Birth of Ybor City, the Cigar Capital of the World (Library of Congress); Tampa's historic streetcars (Tampa Bay History Center); Tampa Bay Hotel (U.S. National Park Service); Gasparilla (City of Tampa)