4 guides east of downtown. Ybor City was founded in 1885 as a company town for cigar manufacture and became, for a time, the cigar capital of the world; it is a National Historic Landmark District, one of very few in Florida, and its casitas (the small wooden workers' houses) are what the designation protects. East of it the city is industrial, with port and rail land that has not yet turned.
Ybor is the one place in Florida where historic review bites this hard on what you may do to a house. The Barrio Latino Commission has authority over exterior changes in the district, and that is a real constraint rather than a formality. It is also why the neighborhood still looks like what it was. The streetcar runs from here to downtown and the Channel District and is free, which makes this the only historic neighborhood in the metro with a rail connection to the center. Check the designation status of the specific property, and check what the industrial land immediately east is zoned for.
4 communities, guide by guide
Belmont Heights
East Tampa's historic Black middle-class neighborhood, on the highest measured ground of any Tampa guide, fifty feet above the bay.
- 50.6 ft
- Elevation at the neighbourhood's reference point, USGS 3DEP point query, 2026
- 1934
- Middleton High School opens as the high school for Tampa's Black students, 1934
East Ybor
The blocks east of 22nd Street where the cigar town continued but the historic district and the Barrio Latino review stop, at a fraction of Seventh Avenue's prices.
- 12.3 ft
- Elevation at the neighbourhood's reference point, USGS 3DEP point query, 2026
- 22nd Street
- The eastern edge of the Ybor City Historic District, and the western edge of this one, as listed in 1974
Palmetto Beach
A company neighborhood built for the cigar factories and the shipyards, on McKay Bay, and the lowest measured ground on the east side of the city.
- 5.9 ft
- Elevation at the neighbourhood's reference point, USGS 3DEP point query, 2026
- ~5 ft
- Storm surge reported through the neighborhood's streets during Hurricane Helene, September 2024
Ybor City
A National Historic Landmark District of cigar-workers' casitas, and the only place in Florida where historic review bites this hard on what you may do to a house.
- 16.3 ft
- Elevation at the neighbourhood's reference point, USGS 3DEP point query, 2026
- 1885
- Vicente Martinez-Ybor moves cigar manufacture here from Key West and lays out the town
Photographs: Hillsborough High School Clock Tower by TampAGS, for AGS Media, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Bergman Building, 2029 E 7th Ave, Ybor City, Florida by Pokemonprime, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · Corina Building 202 S. 22nd St by Jim Roberts, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.
