Miscellany, for Surfing on a Rainy Day

10 Most Endangered Roadside Places, from Visual Ephemera

"Hav-A-Tampa Closes Its Factory" St. Petersburg Times, June 24, 2009

"Brunetti Jr., Soth, Testa to Hialeah Posts" Blood-Horse Magazine July 1, 2009 - Hialeah Race Track to open?

Busch Gardens' Hospitality House - 1963, from Electro's Spark

Vintage Busch Gardens, from Visual Ephemera, 1960s brochure for the amusement park

"These old houses keep turning heads" Tampa Tribune June 23, 2009 - Seminole Heights neighborhood in This Old House magazine

"Hit the bricks: a historical street-paving opportunity in Ybor City" Creative Loafing, June 14, 2009

"Tampa Bay World Records," from Sticks of Fire - World's Longest Golf Cart Parade

"The Tampa That Might Have Been," Creative Loafing, May 23, 2009

My, How You've Changed...

Tucked away on a side street off Ybor's Seventh Avenue is a white building with distinctive, large windows.















It's obviously old,
and looks like it might have been a church,
but now it's a nightclub.

Here are links to photographs of the building when it was the Clark Memorial Baptist Church and Baptist Goodwill Center -- back when it was much taller!

1947 Burgert Brothers photograph (church entrance)

1947 Burgert Brothers photograph (church with children in front)

Burgert Brothers photograph showing the side of the church as well (click on thumbnail image for larger view)

Cuban Bread

Somewhere, hopefully, there is a sociologist or anthropologist studying how and why local traditional foods appear on local public school menus. Growing up in Texas, it was burritos; teaching in north Florida it was sweet potato casserole. But today I'd like to draw that sociologist's, that anthropologist's, attention and yours to the case of Cuban bread in Tampa's school cafeterias.

For decades, Ybor City's La Segunda Bakery has made fresh, crusty loaves of Cuban bread for nearly 200,000 students in the Hillsborough County School District. Recently, demands to eliminate trans-fats from the lunchroom threatened to end this tradition. Fortunately, the bakery was able to tweak the recipe, cut the lard, and keep the contract.

The scent of Cuban bread has been a part of Ybor City for over one hundred years. In the nineteenth century, Cuban bakers stretched dough into long loaves, allowing more slices to be cut from a single loaf. Immigrants brought this bread style to Florida, where it lent itself to the creation of the Cuban sandwich. A palm frond placed on each loaf before it is baked creates a natural split the length of the bread. For decades, family-owned bakeries turned out hundreds of loaves each morning. The loaves were trundled down brick and dirt streets on carts or trucks to deliver families' daily bread. On each porch a nail stuck out from the wall by the front door, and upon this nail the delivery man impaled the bread.

Although many of the bakeries have gone out of business, a handfull still produce fresh Cuban bread to accompany each meal. Friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and business associates linger in cafes of a morning, dunking toasted and buttered slices of bread into steaming cups of cafe con leche. By enjoying local Cuban bread with their lunches, Tampa's students are partaking in a tradition that has been this city's the staff of life for more than a century.

_________

Further Reading:

Cuban Bread Video from Mauricio Faedo's Bakery Tampa Florida USA

"Dough! Not My Job: Cuban Bread Maker" (Tampa Tribune, April 30, 2007)

Kitchen Warfare's Cuban Bread (Tampa Style)

Visit the Ybor City Museum State Park to see a historic bakery and its oven (the museum is in the former Ferlita bakery), as well as the nail by the casita door where bread was delivered.

Story Corps Coming to Ybor City

NPR's Story Corps is coming to Ybor City to record oral histories with local residents.

"StoryCorps To Collect Interviews In Tampa" (Tampa Tribune, December 11, 2008)


Oral history projects have been completed in Ybor City before, beginning in the 1930s when the WPA recorded stories and life histories of cigar workers.

Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937-1942

Italian Club Cemetery

Over 100 years old, the Italian Club Cemetery still serves Tampa's Sicilian community. The Italian Club (L'Unione Italiana) was established as a mutual aid society for immigrants. Part of the dues were used to pay for members' funerals and burials, as well as death benefits to help the families.

Some photos from earlier this year:

Italian Club of Tampa Cemetery

"At the Italian Club Cemetery in Ybor City, every tomb tells a story " (St. Petersburg Times, July 6, 2008)

Festa Italiana 2008 in Ybor City

Several city blocks in Ybor City are blocked off this weekend for Festa Italiana -- today and tomorrow, everyone in Tampa is Italian! The highlight of today's activities were the bocce ball tournament and the wine judging. Tomorrow thousands more people will crowd into Centennial Park for food, games, and music. (Perhaps a few will wander over to the Ybor City Museum State Park to see the new exhibit, Sicilians in Tampa, sponsored by the Ybor City Museum Society and curated by yours truly.)

Photos below:

1) The bocce tournament in Ybor's Centennial Park, March 29, 2008
2) The City's Fortune Bosco Bocce Courts, near the Centro Ybor parking garage
3) Sign across the street from the Bocce Courts marking the location of Ybor City's first railroad station. This is where many Sicilians began their Florida adventures, stepping from the train platform to sandy Ybor streets.

Ybor City Street Scenes

Lewis Hine in Florida

Recent articles in the Tampa Tribune feature one of the photographs taken by Lewis Hine for the National Child Labor Committee. This 1913 portrait of a newsboy in Ybor City is one of many such images that elicited support for child labor laws in this country. Recently, Joe Manning has been tracing the stories and identities of the children Hine photographed, and this fall the Tampa Tribune published a story about Manning's search to find the newsboy ("Photos Expose Child Labor in Tampa," October 21, 2007). Tampa historians traced small clues, and found that the boy is probably Tony Valenti, son of Sicilian immigrants, who grew up to be a successul businessman ("Everybody Turns Out To Be Something," Tampa Tribune, December 8, 2007).

To see the National Child Labor Committee photographs from Tampa, visit http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/nclcquery.html and type "Tampa" in the search box. Or type "Florida" to see Hine's photographs from Jacksonville and Apalachicola as well.

More Books on the Florida Shelf

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow. (Tor, 2003.)
Disney World preserved in a future world. For more, visit the author's website. This book is also available through Daily Lit.

The Columbia Restaurant Spanish Cookbook, by Adela Hernandez Gonzmart and Ferdie Pacheco (University Press of Florida, 1995). History and recipes from Florida's oldest Spanish restaurant.

Bern's Steak House: Reflections & Recipes from a Remarkable Restaurant, by Joyce LaFray. (Seaside Publishing, 2002). History and recipes from Tampa's famous steak house, although it's about organic food, wine, and dessert, as well as the meat.

Wildfire!, by Elizabeth Starr Hills (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002) Short novel for children, set in rural Florida. Themes include peer pressure, jealosy, and family.

El Lector

On Thursday August 16, 2007, at 7pm, Professor Araceli Tinajero will give a talk at the Centro Asturiano de Tampa, titled "El Lector de Tabaqueria: Historia de Una Tradicion Cubana." (click here for more details)

A few years ago NPR had a segment on its "Lost and Found Series" about Ybor City's lectors. The story is online for those of you who haven't heard it, or would just like to listen to it again: "El Lector - He Who Reads."

Florida News Stories

"Dr. Fleas: As the 50-year-old market closes, so does a way of life" (Palm Beach Post, April 29, 2007 -- developer buys flea market, plans to build townhomes)

"Dough! Not my job: Cuban bread maker" (Tampa Tribune reporter spends day making bread at Ybor City's La Segunda Bakery)

"Drought has varied effect on Lake O life" (Naples Daily News, April 29, 2007. How Lake Okeechobee's low water level affects people and animals)

"Historic house on the move-Again" (April 24, 2007, Miami Herald -- Annie Beck bungalow in Fort Lauderdale)

"Parkway designation gone with Ivan's winds" (opinion piece in Pensacola News Journal about scenic highway in the Panhandle)

Festa Italiana in Ybor City

The 10th Annual Festa Italiana kicks off tonight in Tampa's Ybor City with a wine tasting, and tomorrow night is Cinema Italiano! Saturday March 31st, things really get going in Ybor's Centennial Park and the Italian Club, with food, Bocce ball, and a homemade wine contest. Sunday begins with Palm Sunday services, and continues with more food, games, a car show (Italian, of course), and a grape stomping contest. There will also be a kids' area and a culture and genealogy area. You can find a complete schedule and maps on the Festa Italiana's website.

If you are wondering why an Italian festival in Ybor City(?), visit the L'Unione Italiana website for a quick overview. If you're feeling more scholarly, go to the library or your local bookstore for a copy of The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885-1985, by Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta.

There's a lot happening in Tampa this weekend with the start of regular season baseball and MacDill AirFest 2007, but come on out to Ybor for food and fun. If you stop by on Sunday, I'll see you there!

Sunday Afternoon in Ybor City

Ybor City is known for cigars, cigar factories, and the houses where cigar makers used to live. (It is also known for its nightlife, but that came later, after the factory town of Cuban, Spanish, Italian, Jewish, German immigrants faded.)

This afternoon we walked around Ybor, looking at the old buildings. Sure, we saw the factories and the mutual aid societies, but we also revisited the Ybor City Museum. This is a small but interesting musuem featuring many aspects of life in Ybor City, from church to bolita. The main museum building was originally the Ferlita Bakery. A historic marker in front of the museum tells something of the building's history:

"La Joven Francesa Bakery"

"Francisco Ferlita, a native of Santo Stefano, Sicily, established a bakery on this site in 1896. Bread sold for three cents and five cents, and often on credit. In 1922, the wooden structure was destroyed by fire, and a yellow brick building was built around the remaining old red brick ovens. Ferlita died in 1931, and his five sons Stephen, Angelo, Joe, Tony and John continued making Cuban bread until 1973. At the peak of production, 35,000 loaves of Cuban bread were produced weekly."

In Tampa, Cuban bread is long and crusty, somewhat like a French baguette. Before baking, a piece of a palm frond is placed lengthwise on the loaf, creating a split top. This bread is ubiquitous, dunked in a cup of Cuban coffee or pressed into service as a Cuban sandwich. (The bread, the coffee, and the sandwich are popular topics for friendly discussions of whose is best and and the proper way to make them -- also comparisons between Tampa and Miami versions.)

When the Ferlita Bakery was built, fresh bread was delivered door-to-door once or twice a day. At the museum, you can visit a casita (a factory worker's house) and see the nail by the front door where the delivery boy would impale the morning's loaf. This is bread with some oomph.

Museum admission is $3, children 5 and under free. The garden courtyard is a popular spot for weddings, and the museum shop has its own separate building next door. If you go on a Sunday, you don't have to worry about quarters for the parking meter.