El Centro Español de Tampa — Tampa, Florida

El Centro Espanol de Tampa was a mutual aid society for Spanish immigrants, chartered in Ybor City on September 7, 1891, and the Florida Division of Historical Resources calls it the first Latin club organized in Ybor City. In 1912 the society finished two clubhouses at once: a red brick building on 7th Avenue at 16th Street in Ybor City, and a second building, known as El Palacio, at 2306 N. Howard Ave. in West Tampa.

Both buildings survive with federal recognition. The Department of the Interior designated the Ybor City clubhouse a National Historic Landmark in 1988, and the National Park Service record shows the West Tampa clubhouse entered the National Register of Historic Places on July 30, 1974. The society itself still exists, and in May 2018 it moved its administrative offices back into the West Tampa building.

The society came early in Ybor City's life. The Centro Espanol de Tampa describes its founding, five years after the first cigar was produced in 1886, by a group of men of Spanish ancestry who wanted a place to gather after a day in the factories, to be entertained in a cantina and theater, to learn English and, later, to obtain medical services and arrange their burials. The society's website gives its incorporation by the state of Florida as December 1891, three months after the September charter.

Members paid for the first building themselves. According to the 1998 state marker, the society was financed by stock pledges of $10 each from the original 186 charter members, and it opened its first club building in June 1892 on land purchased by Ignacio Haya at 16th Street and 7th Avenue. As a mutual aid society, the marker states, it gave Spanish immigrants a framework for keeping their identity and culture while supplying social privileges and death and injury benefits.

Clio adds that, over time, membership dues paid for social, educational, recreational and cultural services and for healthcare. The Centro's own history credits the society with serving as a model for the Ybor City clubs that followed, naming L'Unione Italiana, the Centro Asturiano, the Circulo Cubano and La Union Marti Maceo.

The society had outgrown the 1892 building, and its members were no longer concentrated in Ybor City. The state marker records that by 1909 club officers began a building campaign for two new clubhouses, one in Ybor City and one to accommodate members in West Tampa. Both were completed in 1912.

West Tampa was then a different city with its own cigar economy. Hillsborough County notes that West Tampa was incorporated as its own city in 1895, that it was developed to lure cigar factories and workers away from Ybor City, and that at the time it was home to the second largest Hispanic population in the state, most of them Cuban. The second Centro Espanol gave Spanish members who lived and worked in that separate cigar city a clubhouse of their own, rather than a trip to 7th Avenue in Ybor City.

Clio describes the West Tampa building's purpose in terms of new arrivals: it was constructed to welcome and orient immigrants from Spain, Cuba and other Spanish-speaking nations coming to the Tampa area, and membership grew by the thousands in the early 1900s.

The Ybor City building replaced the original on the same lot. According to the state marker, El Centro Espanol de Tampa, completed in 1912, sits on the site of the original structure on 7th Avenue. It is a long, two-story rectangular building with a cantina and ballroom at its south end, separated by a foyer and stair hall from the theater at its north end, and the parapet of the stage house steps above the roof line at the north end of the site.

The marker describes the red brick edifice as French Renaissance Revival with Moorish and Spanish influence. The Duke University Migration Memorials record of the marker, numbered F-383 and dedicated in 1998, places it on East 7th Avenue and lists its sponsors as the City of Tampa, the Ybor City Development Corporation and the Florida Department of State. In 1988 the Department of the Interior designated the 7th Avenue building a National Historic Landmark. The sources reviewed for this page do not describe the current use of the Ybor City building.

The West Tampa clubhouse stands at the corner of Howard Avenue and Cherry Street. The Centro Espanol de Tampa calls it El Palacio, The Palace, inaugurated in 1912 and long regarded as the heart of the West Tampa neighborhood, and describes it as still West Tampa's most prominent structure in 2018.

Its exterior leans further toward Moorish detail than the Ybor City building. A description in the Sape A. Zylstra Collection at USF Libraries calls it the social center of West Tampa and notes that the entrances are emphasized as slightly projecting bays topped by turrets, while the Moorish touch is seen in the horseshoe-arched windows and the serrated arch above the east entrance on Howard Avenue.

The architect's name differs by source. The society and the USF catalog credit the Tampa architect Francis J. Kennard. The National Park Service National Register record for El Centro Espanol of West Tampa, NRIS 74000632, lists the architect as Fred J. James and gives 1912 as the significant year.

The society shrank as immigration slowed. Clio reports that immigration declined during the economic collapse of the 1930s and World War II, that members' families moved to other parts of Tampa and joined other organizations, and that by 1983 the Centro Espanol had to consolidate its headquarters and all operations in the West Tampa building. The society later left that building too, and Clio reports that Hillsborough County moved in to house educational programs, with renovations after 2010.

The society's own 2018 account differs in detail. The Centro Espanol wrote in May 2018 that the City of Tampa had purchased the West Tampa building 35 years earlier, and that the building then housed the Hillsborough Education Foundation, which supports students in Hillsborough County Public Schools. That month the Centro Espanol returned to El Palacio, carving out a small administrative space at 2306 N. Howard Ave., more than a century after its founding in 1891.

The society's papers are preserved as the Centro Espanol de Tampa Collection within the Tampa Bay Mutual Aid Society Collections at USF Libraries Special Collections.