Crowd on dock at 4th of July picnic : Oldsmar, Fla.

Courtesy, Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library System

About this photograph

Photograph Order Number

PA 4966

Negative Number

O-173

Date

July 4, 1919

Creator

Burgert Brothers

Publisher

Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library

Date of Photographic Print

1993 printing

Source (original item)

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

Format

JPEG2000

General Notes

Neg. no. O173 ; taken July 4, 1919.

Subjects

Tampa in the 1910s

Tampa in the 1910s was a working city, full stop. Cuban, Spanish, and Italian immigrants kept the Ybor City and West Tampa factories humming at around a million cigars a day by 1910. And on New Year's Day 1914, pilot Tony Jannus flew former mayor A.C. Pheil across the bay from St. Petersburg to Tampa — the first scheduled commercial airline flight anywhere. Downtown kept building up around Franklin Street and the port, and Gasparilla grew teeth: the Krewe invaded by ship for the first time in 1911 (they took 1918 and 1919 off for World War I). The war hit home, too — Tampa built ships, sold Liberty bonds, and lost the Coast Guard cutter Tampa, torpedoed on September 26, 1918. The Burgert photographs from the 1910s document that working city street by street — its factories and festivals, its downtown blocks, and its neighborhoods filling in.

Sources: Birth of Ybor City, the Cigar Capital of the World (Library of Congress); The St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line: 90 Days that Changed the World of Aviation (USF Libraries); USCGC Tampa (U.S. Coast Guard); The Legend of Gasparilla: Myth and History on Florida's West Coast (USF Libraries)