Breaking bread: A culinary history of Tampa in 10 meals

Fort Brooke festivities, 1824

United States soldiers and a band of Seminole Indians gathered at remote Fort Brooke to celebrate Independence Day in 1824. And boy, did they celebrate: The participants raised glasses of liquor in countless toasts to the accompaniment of 21-gun salutes. More than a decade of peace followed the festivities, but the fellowship of old proved elusive. The Second Seminole War began in 1835 and decimated Florida’s struggling Indians. Today, Fort Brooke is memorialized with the mighty Fort Brooke Parking Facility.
Engraving of Ft. Brooke in 1838 via State Archives of Florida

Ybor City’s first Christmas Eve, 1886

Having just moved his factories to Tampa, cigar factory owner Vicente Martinez Ybor feared his restive workers would slip back to Key West or Cuba for the holidays and never return. So he and his wife acted fast: They invited workers and their families for a Christmas Eve (or Noche Buena) feast at his mansion amid the swamps and sand. There was a Christmas surprise: As a sign of gratitude, Ybor divided the profits between his workers, $6,000 in all, or about a month’s wages per worker. Ybor’s gesture won his employees’ confidence, and Cigar City survived to delight and vex generations of Tampans and tourists.
Photo via Burgert Brothers/USF

Tampa Bay Hotel opens, 1891

When tycoon Henry Plant brought his railroad to Tampa in 1884, he found a pathetic hardscrabble town of 700 people. But in the years after the railroad connection, Tampa’s elite clamored for Plant to open a luxury hotel in his latest terminus. On Feb. 5, 1891, Plant’s Tampa Bay Hotel opened with a grand ball. At 9 that evening, the capacity crowd enjoyed an opera. Then Mayor Herman Glogowski led a grand procession to the dining room for a reception and dancing. At 11, a buffet offered oysters, fish, cold roasts, salad and desserts. The party didn’t wind down until 1 a.m.; the guests slept on couches and chairs in the lobby, as the bedrooms had not yet been furnished.

The Tampa Bay Hotel frequently made headlines, especially during the Spanish-American war when journalists and generals commiserated from the veranda’s rocking chairs. The kitchen served up lavish meals with menus written entirely in mangled French. But with a short tourist season of just four months, the hotel never really flourished. The old Tampa Bay Hotel is now home to the University of Tampa and the Henry Plant museum.
Photo via Burgert Brothers/USF

Jose Marti poisoned, 1893

Jose Marti—poet, politician and martyr of Cuban independence—visited Tampa on about 17 occasions. He gave enthralling speeches, raised funds for the Cuban insurrection against Spain and almost got himself killed here in 1893. One night, Spanish secret agents bribed Marti’s bodyguards and poisoned his drink (some say tea, others insist it was gin). When the would-be Spanish assassins were discovered, they begged an ill Marti for forgiveness, which he gave. Marti recovered at the home of Paulina Pedroso (on Eighth Avenue and 13th Street), a sympathetic Afro-Cuban. In 1895, Marti landed in Cuba to join the insurrection, where he promptly died in battle. He left a great literary canon and a newborn nation behind.

A later owner of the Pedroso home deeded the land to the Cuban government in the 1950s, and it became Marti Park. Years later, the vandalizing of the striking Marti sculpture kicked off a proud Ybor tradition of statue desecration and theft.
Photo by Dave Decker

The Free Love Banquet, mid-1880s

Sometime around 1885, one of Tampa’s most notorious meals took place: the Free Love Society’s lusty banquet. The host was Frederick Leontiff Weightnovel, a self-proclaimed doctor from Russia who had concocted his own brand of hair tonic. A tall, flamboyant long-haired hedonist, Weightnovel treated “feminine complaints” from his office downtown in the remnants of Fort Brooke. He was known to abort unwanted pregnancies.

Tampa’s own Rasputin held his Free Love Society banquet at the Old Habana Hotel in Ybor City (near the corner of 15th Street and 7th Avenue, but burned down in Ybor’s first great fire in November 1891). Thirty of Tampa’s most eligible (and incorrigible) bachelors arrived on horseback, clad in colorful costumes and sashes. Multiple aphrodisiac-laden courses of food greeted them inside, served by African-American women naked from head to toe. Even the anarchists of Ybor City reacted with outrage.

Weightnovel and his Free Love society got a free ride to jail that night, and it would not be his last. After a young woman died in his care in1902, police arrested him again. His two trials riveted the city, until the ill doctor was sentenced to hard labor in a prison camp. Ever defiant, he poisoned himself rather than submit to the sentence. Today, Tampa celebrates debauchery and poisons itself on days named after a fictitious pirate. Weightnovel may not be the pirate Jose Gaspar, but at least he’s real.
Photo by George Lansing Taylor Jr via University of North Florida Digital Commons

Strike Street soup, 1920

Unlike most Floridians, the immigrants of Ybor City and West Tampa (Sevilla building c.1923, pictured here) were not sheepish about unionizing and making demands of their employers. Unions managed to score a few victories in the early years, but they did not continue. When the cigar industry originally settled in Tampa, it did so with the knowledge that the city had agreed to lend its police force to the factory owners when labor troubles arose. During the strike of 1920, determined workers endured for 10 months outside the factories. The Tampa Tribune, at the time a zealous anti-labor advocate, raised the specter of “over-paid and corn-fed agitators [who] intend to absolutely annihilate the cigar industry in this city.” Labor newspaper El International fired back, saying that the pampered factory owners “Don’t know the anarchist-breeding effect of hunger on the victim ... champagne and caviar have always been at their service.”

In 1920, the producers stood firm against the strike, and employed the police and vigilantes to ransack the soup kitchens. They threw the food into the manure-laden streets. The destruction of soup kitchens dealt the union a deadly blow. Before long, even the most fanatical strikers began to cave. The strike ended in February 1921 with $12 million in wages lost. The unions never fully recovered from the debacle.
Photo via Burgert Brothers/USF

Christmas dinner, MacDill Field, 1941

Tampa was already home to important military installations when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The war led to construction of three air bases around the city: Drew Field, MacDill Air Force Base and Henderson Field, the remains of which lie beside the University of South Florida and the Yuengling Brewery (Mel’s Hot Dogs is its last remaining building).

The armed forces tried to make Christmas as pleasant as possible for recruits. The three airfields held a huge holiday feast for servicemen and their guests with white tablecloths and Christmas trees. The soldiers returned to the mess twice that day “on a basis of catch as catch can, no holds barred,” the Tribune observed. But the meal was marred by bad war news all over the world, and the holiday meals to follow would be less extravagant. Two years later, the commissaries cut the Christmas dinner luxuries found on the 1941 menu, such as ham, tomatoes, nuts, buttered peas, even pumpkin pie and lemonade. The ongoing war justified unprecedented military spending, especially in the southern U.S. Tampa has benefited from military spending ever since.
Robertson and Fresh (Firm) and University of South Florida — Tampa Campus Library, "338 Ordnance Company - 52 Ordnance - BN - (AUN) - MacDill Field - Florida - February 27th 1941" (1941). Robertson and Fresh Collection of Tampa Photographs. Image 145.

Tampa International Airport terminal dedicated, 1952

During the war, Drew Field was home to bomber pilots in training. In 1946, the old base became Tampa International Airport. In 1952, the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority spent $1 million on a new terminal, an unprecedented expense at the time. On a sweltering August day, 300 dignitaries crowded into Bartke’s Restaurant, the terminal’s “ultra modern” steakhouse. In a publicity stunt for the dedication, airlines flew ingredients to the restaurant from all over the hemisphere: fruit from Puerto Rico, avocado from Cuba, turtle from the Caymans and lobster from Canada. If the menu looked lavish, the guests were not always comfortable. The dining room’s air conditioner failed, forcing the suited dignitaries to wipe their brows with cloth napkins.

The heavy meal of steak, potatoes, fried chicken, onion rings and lobster must have seemed regrettable once the men joined a crowd of spectators on the tarmac in the insufferable summer heat. For the next five hours, important people gave predictable speeches. Finally, the Air Force band from MacDill played the national anthem while the flag was raised.

Then three small propeller planes landed and taxied nearby. Tony Pizzo, a local liquor dealer and historian, emerged from one of the planes dressed like a dictator of a banana republic. Posing as the “mayor” of Ybor City, El Jefe kissed the hands of ladies in the crowd, while his cohorts gave away loaves of Cuban bread. He apologized for his tardiness, and joked that menacing UFOs had thrown him off course. He then presented Mayor Curtis Hixon with the key to Ybor City, and everyone had a good laugh.
Photo via Burgert Brothers/USF

Lunch counter integration, 1960

Sit-ins by black college students began in Greensboro, North Carolina early in 1960. Disgusted by segregation practices that allowed them to spend money in stores like Woolworth’s and Kress but excluded them from the lunch counters, young African-Americans took action. Soon, activists crowded into lunch counters across the country and demanded to be served. Tampa’s NAACP Youth Council began sit-ins early in February. After only three days, local merchants sued for peace, promising to come to an agreement behind the scenes.

It took some strong voices of reason, such as those of Robert Saunders (Tampa NAACP field secretary), Rev. A. Leon Lowry (who once taught MLK) and Clarence Fort (head of the Youth Council), to hold back the young activists from further action for the next six months. The negotiations helped spare Tampa from the racial violence that occurred in other places, keeping the city attractive to tourists. On Sept. 14, Tampa’s first day of integrated dining occurred when about 150 NAACP members dined at 18 lunch counters. They visited in groups of two on the off hours of 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Among them was Clarence Fort. His dining partner did not show up for the historic event, forcing him to eat alone.

“Now that was a frightening experience,” he recalled years later. “I was too nervous to even eat. It was early in the morning, with bacon, coffee, and just as I started to butter my toast, two white guys came up, and they said, ‘Look what we have here, a nigger at the lunch counter.’ Other people were there; two or three got up and left. But I’d say at least 10 remained.”

Fort paid his bill and left a full plate of food behind. A cooperative police officer made sure that he left safely. It may not have been a very pleasant meal, but it paved the way for future generations.
Photo by Robertson and Fresh Collection of Tampa Photographs/USF Digital Commons

The University Club admits women, 1988

The invite-only University Club, perched high above Tampa in a downtown skyscraper, served up a fine gumbo. But the city’s own “He Man Woman Haters” club had one major problem: women kept getting invited to dine there, but club rules denied them entry.

Then, in 1974, the club turned away County Commissioner Betty Castor. She left with dignity and dished the story to a hungry press. The story traveled as far as The New Yorker. Members claimed that women’s high-pitched voices were too loud for gentlemanly dining. If corporate ladder-climbing women wanted to attend power lunches, they were told to go someplace else—Malio’s Steakhouse, perhaps.

But by the mid-1980s, women had risen in America’s corporate boardrooms, law offices and medical practices. Soon, professional associations could no longer book their powwows in the lofty University Club. A Supreme Court decision had forcibly integrated the Rotary Club nationwide after banning gender discrimination in clubs where business is conducted. Even the American Bar Association suggested that lawyers spurn discriminatory clubs. The controversy in Tampa continued until the University Club held a meeting and conducted a secret vote in 1988. The membership consented to allow women to join the club and dine there. The genie was out of the bottle. Soon women and minorities joined the club.

Did women win much? Sure, they won begrudging respect from a few stubborn men. Now the members-only club discriminates in less obvious ways. What are the odds they would welcome an applicant who makes minimum wage?
Photo via Florida Women’s Hall of Fame