The Political Whore

Photo: Amber Rhea/flickr.com

By Manny Leto
PoHo contributor

Most Tampa folks believe there are tunnels under the streets of Ybor City. People say they criss-cross 7th Avenue and were used by bootleggers in the 1920s to smuggle booze between establishments or stash cash in hidden vaults. Sounds sexy. I’m not sure whether it’s true. I met someone once whose family owned a grocery store on 7th. Apparently, she played in the tunnel under the family store when she was a little girl.

Maybe. After last week the only thing I know for sure is hidden under the asphalt in Ybor City is Augusta Brick.

After the city worker pounded on my door at 8:30 a.m., telling me to move my car or he would tow it, he and his crew from the Public Works department began “resurfacing” 4th Avenue, the street I currently call home.

When I came back during my lunch hour I was surprised to see red brick – and a lot of it – peeking out from cleared-away sections of asphalt.

I know this may not seem like a big deal. But it’s significant for several reasons.

For starters, the city has for years maintained that there is no brick under the asphalt streets of Ybor. Every now and again, neighbors will ask if our local TIF funds – tax dollars that, rather than going into the city’s general fund, are instead spent in the neighborhood in which they are collected – could be spent on “re-bricking” some of the area streets. The neighborhood is usually rebuffed in this effort, the usual answer: “we don’t know how much brick is left under the asphalt.”

Well, this week we got an answer. A lot. A lot of brick is left under the asphalt.

Over the past few years there has been talk of replacing the asphalt on 7th Avenue with brick, a massive and costly undertaking since, 7th Avenue is the only street everyone definitively knows has no bricks (they were removed in the 1960s). And, at the request of the Historic Ybor Neighborhood Civic Association, bricks have been added to about a half dozen cross walks south and north of 7th Avenue.

But this week, in one afternoon, 4th Avenue from 21st Street to 13th Street was almost completely “re-bricked.”

Not just aesthetic, bricks are a traffic-calming mechanism. Cars travel slower on brick streets than they do on asphalt. Brick streets also improve property values.

Along with the preservation of historic structures and maintaining the established street grid, brick streets contribute to the look and feel of historic Ybor. It is, after all, the historic character of Ybor that keeps visitors enthralled (I wish I could say the same for locals). People don’t book international flights to Tampa so they can visit the Brandon Town Center. They come for the brick streets of Ybor City.

Workers return on Monday. In the meantime, the Ybor City Development Corporation has asked Public Works to look into the issue. If the bricks stay, it could represent a huge chunk of change that won’t come out of the neighborhood TIF funds in the future. The plan, though, is to cover the bricks with asphalt.

Meanwhile, one neighbor has vowed to take a crowbar to some of the asphalt in front of his house just to prove how easy it is to remove.

So, if you’re not busy this weekend…

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