Bulldozers Aweigh!

With state and federal law on their side, an abundance of support and apparently good intentions, the people who ran Tampa in the 1960s began "Project R-13."

University Of South Florida Special Collection BEFORE AND AFTER: On top, an aerial photograph from 1966 shows Ybor City dotted with small shotgun-style homes. The second photo, (below) taken a decade later, shows the devastation wrought by urban renewal. I-4 is visible at the top of both photos.

After all, something had to be done with Ybor City. The cigar industry that fueled its rise from 1886 was dying. Latins had moved out to West Tampa, becoming middle-class citizens and abandoning Ybor to be replaced by low-income families. The shotgun-style wooden casitas so valued as historic structures today were falling apart, a visual blight.

When Project R-13 was finished in the 1970s, more than 700 homes and businesses had been flattened. Eleven hundred people had been "relocated." Large tracts of residential property had been turned into government facilities. Ybor City's future had been rewritten, from working neighborhood to cheesy tourist attraction.

Thanks, urban renewal.

A new exhibit opening Saturday at the Ybor City State Museum traces the history of that controversial federal program in Tampa and gives us some lessons on how to deal with its aftermath, still a problem more than 40 years later from Ybor City to Central Park Village to the Riverfront.

"We're living with the legacy of urban renewal more than the legacy of the cigar industry or even immigration," said exhibit curator Manny Leto. "Urban renewal is really the story of everybody moving out of downtown."

Urban renewal was an ill-conceived post-World War II, post-New Deal school of city planning adopted by our government as a way to deal with increasingly desperate inner-city problems. Urban renewal used the power of eminent domain (still controversial today, as the Kelo case in Connecticut shows us) to confiscate rundown properties and bulldoze large slum areas.

Take, for instance, the Maryland Avenue project. The first project initiated under the newly formed Urban Renewal Agency of the City of Tampa, it was approved in 1957 by the Tampa City Council. For $3 million, the city cleared out an African-American neighborhood between downtown and Ybor City known as "The Scrub."

That area, next to the Central Park Village housing project, remains a challenge today. The failed Civitas project would have rebuilt the low-income public housing as a mixed-income, mixed-use urban village. City and housing officials are negotiating with one of the Civitas partners for a scaled-down version to replace the current projects.

Riverfront slums were bulldozed in 1963. (We're still trying to fix that area with the Riverwalk project.) Ybor City's turn came in 1965.

Already cut off from the neighborhood to the north by the construction of Interstate 4 earlier in the decade, Ybor City saw the biggest change under urban renewal. A stunning 59 percent of its acreage was taken by the government and bulldozed. Before-and-after aerial photos (reprinted here) show the result, which looks like the aftermath of wartime carpet-bombing.

Sadly, there was little public outcry at the time. Immigrant families who were being displaced trusted big government, remembering the WPA-type programs that had given them jobs and improved the nation.

"By and large, a lot of the people wanted this," Leto said. "They didn't have a concept of what would happen."

The idea at least sounded good: Once the government had seized the land and bulldozed the older buildings, redevelopers would buy the land cheap and create a brand new landscape.

A brochure printed for prospective redevelopers by the city touted Ybor City as having "every chance of serving a vital economic function in the Tampa urban area and becoming one of the most powerful tourist attractions and centers of Latin charm in this country."

La Gaceta WRECKING BALL: An unidentified Ybor City business falls to the demolition crews in this undated photograph.

But fewer than expected took the bait, and some of those that did purchase the land sat on it without rebuilding, even though by doing so they were violating federal deadlines. Still other buyers found it impossible to build once insurance companies began red-lining the area.

So instead of new homes and businesses, large parcels of land ended up being used for government purposes that were less than compatible with the neighborhood and generated no taxes for the historic district's improvement. Hillsborough Community College built a sprawling campus (after Dick Greco convinced it to open in Ybor to block the property from being built as low-income housing); Hillsborough County ended up building headquarters for the sheriff, the Environmental Protection Commission and the Children's Board -- offices that largely shut down at 5 p.m., leaving only dark buildings instead of living, breathing neighborhoods.

In the aftermath of urban renewal, Ybor City foundered. Wild ideas were floated. Homebuilder Jim Walter and restaurateur Cesar Gonzmart wanted to build a walled city in Ybor in the 1970s, with the main draw being non-lethal bullfights. A demonstration of the sport held in Bradenton to convince state lawmakers to roll back anti-bullfighting laws went amiss when the bull went wild and was shot to death by a state trooper.

The truth is that from Ybor to downtown to West Tampa (where Ybor City's Latins moved after "Urban Removal"), the city is still trying to come to terms with what the bulldozing wrought. It contributed to the growth of the suburbs, urban sprawl and expensive transportation problems.

The Ybor City State Museum's exhibit traces the whole sad chapter. But its opening is part of a happier celebration, the Ybor City Neighborhood Expo, which includes an 11 a.m.-3 p.m. tour of new houses and condos as residential is making a comeback. (Tickets are $10.) More than 20 vendors from real estate agencies, banks, mortgage companies, city departments and contractors will be in the Museum's gardens to answer questions about living in Ybor City. The city's top preservation official, Del Acosta, will speak about the restored Bunker Building and Tres Amici Café.

The Neighborhood Expo runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Museum at N. 19th Street and E. Ninth Avenue.