The 130-year-old J.C. Newman Cigar Company’s latest passion project to bring Ybor City history back to life is the restoration of the 115-year-old Sanchez y Haya building, the former hotel, restaurant, bar, and boarding house across the street from the company’s renovated historic El Reloj cigar factory.
Sanchez y Haya opened in 1910, the same year as El Reloj, as the first structure in Tampa built of rebar-reinforced concrete. Now, the long-vacant building’s been stripped down to its columns and walls to restore it “so that it looks, feels and smells just like it did 100 years ago,’’ fourth-generation J.C. Newman owner Drew Newman says before leading a tour of Sanchez Y Haya during Tampa Archives Awareness Week in July.
J.C. Newman Company restored El Reloj, with its iconic clock tower, in 2020. Today, it’s Tampa’s last cigar factory in operation and the only factory in the United States that still rolls cigars by hand and hand-operated antique machines.
“Behind me, upstairs, we’ll roll about 60,000 cigars today,” Newman says during the Archives Awareness Week event. “That’s what we do every day.”
The main floor of the factory houses a museum showcasing J.C. Newman’s history and early products. The company conducts tours and also rents out space in El Reloj for weddings and other events.
“We went from zero visitors five years ago to 20,000 visitors last year,’’ Newman says, noting that his father, Eric Newman, “seems to like the fact that we are the top-ranking museum in the city of Tampa on Tripadvisor. How crazy is that?’’
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City of TampaThe interior of the 115-year-old Sanchez y Haya building before restoration work beginsThe building the company is now restoring at 1601 Columbus Drive was built by cigar manufacturers and real estate developers Serafin Sanchez and Ignacio Haya, who had opened their factory a few weeks before their friend Vicente Martinez-Ybor, the cigar district’s founder, opened his. On April 13, 1886, Sanchez y Haya produced the first cigar rolled in Tampa. In Tampa's heyday from the late 1800s to the 1920s, some 200 cigar factories operated in what became known as Cigar City.
Construction on the Sanchez y Haya building is expected to begin in September, with the opening scheduled for October 2026. It will be what it was at the beginning: a restaurant, bar, and hotel.
It has undergone varied incarnations since the beginning, Newman says.
“Last century, it was a grocery store, a brothel of sorts, a speakeasy during Prohibition, a distillery,’’ he says. “When I was a little kid, it was the seediest of dive bars called the Chip-In, and we still have the Chip-In sign.’’
Newman relays a story Tampa Mayor Jane Castor shared about the Chip-In, which was on her beat when she was a rookie cop. Castor said the dive bar had the biggest bathrooms in Tampa.
“I said, ‘What do you mean, Mayor?’” Newman recalls. “She said, ‘Every time I went and responded to a call for help, I’d go inside, and everybody in the bar would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t see the incident. I was in the bathroom.’ And so the bathrooms had to be huge in this building.’’
Restoring another piece of Ybor history
Another restored fixture of Ybor City history, a statue of Queen Isabella of Spain that Martinez-Ybor commissioned 130 years ago, is now on display at the historic Centro Asturiano building, which opened in 1914 as a social club for Spanish immigrant workers and their families.
The cigar factory owner used the statue of the queen who funded Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the New World as a promotional tool for his products. It was on display in London, Paris, and at the Chicago World Exposition of 1893.
The statue stood in Martinez-Ybor’s factory for decades and had fallen into disrepair when Harris Mullen, the late founder of Florida Trend magazine, led an effort to restore it. It was displayed at the Ybor City Visitors Center and then in the old Centro Español building. Centro Asturiano acquired it on loan from the Ybor City Historical Society a few weeks ago.
The entire statue rises to nearly 14 feet, says Ansley Blackwell, Director of Sales
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Courtesy Centro AsturianoThe statue of Queen Isabella of Spain on display at Centro Asturiano and Community Partnerships at Centro Asturiano. The four-foot-tall wooden carving of the 15th-century queen stands atop a globe, symbolizing, no doubt, her role in making Spain a colonial power. The statue, which weighs over 1,000 pounds, breaks down into pieces for transporting. It takes four people to lift the wooden sculpture to the top of the globe, Blackwell says.
Meanwhile, an artifact from Ybor City’s more recent past will be on display at the reopened Sanchez y Haya building -- the table from the popular, now-defunct La Tropicana Cafe that was reserved for the late Roland Manteiga, longtime editor of La Gaceta newspaper. Manteiga conducted interviews over lunch at the table and on the red telephone that was installed especially for him. The red phone will be part of the display, Newman says.
Newman says they were lucky to find a bunch of photos of the building from 100 years ago, which they consulted for the restoration. In the early days, cigar workers and their visitors stayed there in tiny rooms along an upstairs corridor, with a bathroom and shower for the guests at the back of the building. The renovated rooms will be fewer and larger, and have their own bathrooms, of course. The corridor will hug the “light well,’’ a recessed, sunny area in the middle of the building that will house a garden.
J.C. Newman also plans to transport a 100-year-old tobacco barn from North Florida. The 40 ft. by 80 ft. building, where tobacco leaves were hung for curing, will be set up adjacent to the Sanchez y Haya building.
When the company took on the restoration of Sanchez y Haya, Newman says the first thing workers had to do was brace the building, which he was afraid would blow
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City of TampaFourth-generation J.C. Newman Cigar Co. owner Drew Newman leads a tour of the Sanchez y Haya building during Tampa Archives Awareness Week.down in a hurricane. During the tour in July, he showed one column where the rebar is bowed out and the concrete in the middle has worn away, making the top and bottom of the column look like a stalactite and stalagmite in a cave.
“We’ve saved this column. We’re going to put it back in the building, not bearing load,’’ he says to the laughter of the crowd, “but to just kind of show how far we’ve come.’’
Concrete was so new as a material in 1910 that builders didn’t really know what to do with it, Newman says. He points out that when workers put down the original floor, they poured concrete over a layer of bricks, not realizing that bricks were not strong enough to support the columns. The bricks collapsed and columns sank, causing the roof to sag in spots. In keeping with preservation requirements, poured concrete will be used to restore the building.
When finished, floor-to-ceiling glass panels at the entrance will flood the restaurant and bar with light. A completely separate cigar bar will occupy another section of the ground floor. Upstairs, the
hotel will have 11 rooms, including two that open onto a balcony facing El Reloj’s iconic clock tower.
Newman tells the Archives Awareness Week tour group that he envisions future hotel guests coming out on the balcony in the morning with their pastries and coffee. They face the clock tower. Nearby is the 110-year-old La Segunda bakery. From a corner, they can see the skyline of Tampa.
From that spot, they’ll “experience Tampa’s history,’’ he says.
For more information, go to J.C. Newman tours and Centro Asturiano