West Tampa

West Tampa is the cigar-making district west of the Hillsborough River that was incorporated as the City of West Tampa on May 18, 1895 and annexed by Tampa in 1925.

The 1983 National Register nomination for the West Tampa Historic District records that West Tampa was incorporated on May 18, 1895 to regulate booming land development and provide services such as fire and police protection and street paving, and that 1925 was the year the City of Tampa annexed it. The West Tampa Branch Library history adds that the new town incorporated with a population of nearly 3,000 people and became one of Tampa's earliest suburban towns, with its heyday from 1900 to about 1920 when cigar factories flourished and commercial buildings filled the core around Main Street and Howard Avenue.

Today the City of Tampa runs much of its West Tampa work through the West Tampa Community Redevelopment Area, which the city describes as having a central location in the heart of the city between Downtown and the Westshore business district. The city's historic district maps page lists West Tampa among its National Historic District Maps, alongside Hampton Terrace and Palmetto Beach.

A group of Tampa businessmen led by lawyer Hugh Macfarlane began promoting land west of the Hillsborough River in 1887 as a second cigar manufacturing center after Ybor City.

According to the nomination, Macfarlane was born in Scotland in 1851, immigrated with his parents to Fall River, Massachusetts in 1865, earned a law degree from Boston University, moved to Tampa in 1884 and was appointed city attorney three years later. He held the same office for the City of West Tampa after its 1895 incorporation and helped finance cigar factories and commercial enterprises there. The nomination is careful about his title: unlike the founder of Ybor City, Macfarlane had no experience in cigar making, so his role as founder of the West Tampa cigar industry was largely restricted to promoting land development with methods already proven in Ybor City.

The river was the obstacle. When the promotion began there were no bridges across the Hillsborough River at Tampa, and the west bank could be reached only by ferry. Henry Plant's bridges at Lafayette Street and Polk Street, built to reach the Tampa Bay Hotel he began in 1888, did not serve the West Tampa developers, so in 1892 they formed the Macfarlane Investment Company to raise capital for a third bridge at Arch Street. The company also founded an electric street car line between downtown Tampa and West Tampa by way of the Arch Street bridge. Macfarlane's original subdivision, filed April 22, 1892, was an eleven block tract with a central square at the present intersection of Main Street and Howard Avenue.

West Tampa's first cigar company, the Julius Ellinger Company from Key West, arrived in early 1893, one of seven Key West firms to move there between 1893 and 1895.

The nomination says the Ellinger factory was a three-story brick building near the new bridge, surrounded by a brick hotel, wood frame stores and workers' cottages, none of which survive. Growth then shifted half a mile west, where the O'Halloran Cigar Company, also from Key West, began operations in 1894 near Howard Avenue and Main Street, on the square of Macfarlane's original plat. By 1899 a clearly identifiable community had formed around it.

Source: West Tampa Historic District nomination, National Park Service. Before 1903 West Tampa had only two brick factories, the Julius Ellinger factory of 1893 on Garcia Street and the Cuesta Rey factory of 1896 on Howard Avenue. The original corporate limits ran from the river west to Habana Avenue and from Cypress Street north to Columbus Drive, and most significant development between 1895 and 1925 happened inside them.

West Tampa was a working-class cigar town of Spanish, Cuban and Italian immigrants whose mutual aid societies built clubs such as the Centro Espanol of 1912 and the Sicilian Club of 1929.

The nomination explains that thousands of Spanish, Cuban and Italian immigrants came to Ybor City and West Tampa to work in the cigar industry and brought mutual aid societies with them, which provided low-cost medical, educational and other welfare services. It names the Centro Espanol (1912) and the Sicilian Club (1929) as the most significant masonry buildings in the West Tampa district other than the cigar factories.

Most West Tampa buildings were homes. The nomination describes small wood frame vernacular houses and bungalows once occupied by the working class, many of them nearly identical 1890s houses set in rows near the factories, followed by a second wave of bungalows in the 1920s, and it notes the community had no examples of high style residential architecture. The West Tampa Branch Library describes the library as a historic link between the City of West Tampa, the cigar industry and the Latin and African-American communities.

The West Tampa library on Howard Avenue is a 1913 Carnegie library, one of only ten public libraries in Florida funded by Andrew Carnegie, according to the county library system.

The Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library says the Carnegie Library on Howard Avenue was built in 1913 in the Neo-Classical Revival style on land donated by Angel Cuesta, a prominent cigar factory owner, and that the original building still serves as the West Tampa community library. It is part of the West Tampa National Historic District and is a City of Tampa Historic Structure. A 5,000 square foot addition broke ground in September 2002 and was completed in September 2003, and refurbishment of the original building was finished in April 2004.

The branch address is 2312 W. Union St., Tampa, phone 813-273-3652. The library lists hours of 10am to 6pm Monday through Saturday, closed Sunday, with a Route 7 bus stop at Main Street and Howard Avenue.

After the 1925 annexation West Tampa's cigar industry shrank, with eleven major factories leaving Tampa between 1928 and 1939, according to the National Register nomination.

The nomination says no new factories had been built since 1912, and that between 1928 and 1939 eleven major factories moved out of Tampa, five other firms went out of business and three consolidated. As members lost jobs, the mutual aid clubs could not collect dues, and the 1983 form described the Centro Espanol and Sicilian Club in West Tampa as abandoned at that time. Of thirteen surviving factory buildings, it said, only one was still making cigars, and the Julius Ellinger factory was pulled down in 1963 for interstate construction.

The district was determined eligible for the National Register on March 4, 1983, on a request submitted by the City of Tampa's Housing and Urban Development and Community Development office. The NPGallery record for NRIS 83003539 describes it as roughly bounded by Cypress and Ivy Streets and Fremont and Habana Avenues and lists 1893 and 1933 as significant years; the nomination form gives the acreage as 273.

The West Tampa Community Redevelopment Area covers about 964 acres, and its current projects include a Rey Park improvement and a district wide alleyway study.

The CRA legal description begins at Armenia Avenue and Columbus Drive, which it also calls Michigan Avenue, runs east along Columbus Drive to the Columbus Street Bridge, follows the centerline of the Hillsborough River south across the North Boulevard Bridge, I-275 and the Laurel Street Bridge (Fortune Street Bridge) to the Cass Street Bridge, then runs west along Cass Street and the CSX railroad beside the University of Tampa campus before returning by Kennedy Boulevard and Armenia Avenue. It states a total of 964.33 acres, more or less.

The West Tampa CRA projects page, updated September 24, 2026, lists the Rey Park Improvement Project and the District Wide Alleyway Study, and the main CRA page links a Rey Park improvements survey, a West Tampa CRA parking study and a Fremont Linear Park survey. The city says that as the West River Plan is implemented, public housing and the surrounding area will become a diverse urban community open to the Hillsborough River.

The largest city land deal in the CRA is Rome Yard. A February 26, 2021 City of Tampa release said the city issued a Request for Proposals in October 2020 to redevelop approximately 18 acres of city-owned land immediately west of the Hillsborough River, east of Rome Avenue, south of Columbus Drive and north of Spruce Street, received six submissions by December 15, 2020, and advanced three candidates to interviews, with affordable and workforce housing among the goals.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the West Tampa Historic District nomination and NPGallery record, the West Tampa Branch Library page, four City of Tampa CRA pages including the legal description and the Rome Yard release, and the city historic district maps.