This afternoon, the Tampa Bay Rays announced they have selected a new baseball stadium site in the historic neighborhood of Ybor City.
Many “Sunbelt” urban areas look and feel as though they were spawned by a corporate committee at some point in the late twentieth century: a generic landscape of malls, office parks and six-lane arterial roads.
Ybor City, however, looks and feels like, well, a real city.
A district of Tampa along the terminus of Interstate-4, this historic Cuban district, once home to cigar factories and low income housing has transformed into a vibrant Hispanic community (with some influences by various cultural social clubs), and has become the hub of nightlife for the city of Tampa.