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1890s Ybor City: Green and sustainable (plus vintage postcards)

November 2, 2009 at 1:26 pm by Grant Rimbey CNU

This post is about one of my favorite places in Tampa Bay: Ybor City. ybor5

The Ybor City I admire is the community pre “urban renewal”: that pathetic time in the 1960s when vast stretches of this remarkable multi-lingual and multi-ethnic historic district were demolished in the name of the mid-century streamlined suburban dream. I’ve written about Tampa’s planning history in previous Creative Loafing posts: The Tampa That Might Have Been, The roots of sprawl, and Fixing sprawl and redesigning suburbia.

The idea behind urban renewal (a national program) was that it demolish the existing crumbling old historic fabric of cities, and the newly vacant lots would become modern new development that would spur the economy. In Ybor this Faustian new construction never materialized, as I remember the old 1980s “Rough Riders restaurant” in Ybor being surrounded by vacant lots.

The real premise for urban renewal was most likely racial and socioeconomic, with the goal of moving the poor and disenfranchised out of the cities and into the sparkling new modern housing projects further out. Mind you, this re-location scheme is still being pursued by Tampa and the county to this day as these old housing projects are now meeting the wrecking ball and the unfortunate inhabitants are relocated even further out to places like the USF area (aka “Suitcase City”), Lutz, Carrollwood and Brandon (might I add places that largely lack mass transit). Dear readers, please note that South Tampa is not on the list.

The urban renewal program also decimated the communities of West Tampa and Central Avenue at the same time. The Interstate Highway System was the coup de grâce for all three, after which they became shadows of their former vibrant selves. Today these incredible communities exist largely as background in films of the time like Black Like Me, which offers fleeting glimpses of old Central Avenue, and books like A Stranger In The Barrio which illustrate what Ybor might have been like in its final days.

If we think Ybor today is unique, imagine it pre-urban renewal when it was many times larger. Ybor, West Tampa and Central Avenue pre-urban renewal created a synergy that is nothing like the largely cleaned-up and suburbanized post-renewal models we see today.

If you can overlook out-of-place Centro Ybor, the tattooed teenagers from suburbia trying to be cool and the inhabitants from the nearby housing projects looking for something to do, you’ll discover a green and sustainable urban model unique to Tampa that illustrates the time-proven attributes of The Old Urbanism: buildings pulled up to the sidewalk with parking behind or somewhere else (who enjoys walking down a sidewalk and looking over seas of surface parking? IKEA, take note); beautifully detailed historic architecture with storefronts facing the street; variety in architecture which though side by side are obviously “built by different hands at different times” (old Ybor was not created in one year by one developer); small public parks or plazas with benches tucked into the streetscape to create a sense of place; balconies, canopies and street trees for shade; parallel parking on the street to slow traffic and provide convenient parking; mixed-use buildings: retail located below residential or office; and enough density that it’s both walkable and easily served by mass transit.

This is the Ybor that I admire, that tiny remnant that survived urban renewal and survives today as a sustainable and green model that planners should emulate despite our culture’s past efforts to destroy it.

Following are antique postcards from the author’s collection that offer a glimpse of pre-urban renewal Ybor City:

yborB