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Burgert Brothers Collection · March 10, 1919

Bungalow at the Belleview Biltmore Hotel : Clearwater, Fla.

Photograph Order Number PA 1812

Bungalow at the Belleview Biltmore Hotel : Clearwater, Fla. — Burgert Brothers Collection, courtesy Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library System

Courtesy, Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library System

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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)