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Burgert Brothers Collection · 1903

O. Falk and Brother Dry Goods and Millinery at 714-718 Franklin Street, interior of clothing and shoe department : Tampa, Fla.

Photograph Order Number PA 562

O. Falk and Brother Dry Goods and Millinery at 714-718 Franklin Street, interior of clothing and shoe department : Tampa, Fla. — Burgert Brothers Collection, courtesy Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library System

Courtesy, Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library System

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The Burgert Brothers Photographic Collection of nearly 15,000 images presents a unique pictorial record of the commercial, residential and social growth of Tampa Bay and Florida's West coast from the late 1800s to the early 1960s.

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)