Your Neighborhood Cigar Factories

I may have posted this link before, but a friend of mine who works in the specialty coffee industry was writing an article for Fresh Cup Magazine about Tampa's Cuban coffee and cigar culture and he went to the Gonzalez Habano Cigar Co. website to do some research. He commented on what a great resource the history section of the website was. Wally Reyes has put together an e-museum that covers just about every aspect of Tampa's cigar history you can think of. I found the Tampa cigar factories map and photos to be of particular interest. It's nice to ride by our historic cigar factories and be able to put a name on them. Now when your friends come to visit you in West Tampa you can say, "that cool brick bulding with the old clock tower behind my house was the Y. Pendas & Alvarez Cigar, Co. It was built in 1909. When Enrique Pendas died, the clock hands were stopped in his memory at 3:45 a.m., the time of his death". You can also see why these unique buildings were designed the way they were in the section of the website that shows the anatomy of a cigar factory. I've found that visitors to West Tampa are always interested to know things like the fact that the factories were built on an east-west axis with lots of windows for even lighting throughout the day. They had no electric lighting, an important factor for examining the color of the tobacco leaves, providing good light for the workers and sorting the finished product by color. It's nice to be able to put all of this "cigar history" in West Tampa into context. I think it's sometimes easy to make a brief, general association between Tampa and cigars, but we're living in a neighborhood that was built up entirely around cigar making and was the origin of what we today know of as Tampa. We drive down streets where hundreds of cigar artisans from Asturias, Sicily and Cuba went to work every day and where every bulding and house we pass was built up around the cigar industry. This web site really gives great detail and puts life into it all. When people come to my neighborhood they love to hear the stories that come from West Tampa's rich history and Wally's website has loads of info that can help you put a real face and an identity on your neighborhood.

http://www.cigarsoftampa.com/tpa-factoriesmap.html

http://www.cigarsoftampa.com/anatomy.html