The document summarizes a play called "Why the 'Y' (in Ybor)?" about the history and present state of Ybor City in Tampa, Florida. It was commissioned by the Hillsborough Moving Company to explore Ybor City's past as a center of cigar manufacturing and its current identity, which has shifted to bars and nightlife. The play uses characters like Deezo to guide the audience through Ybor City's murky past and present without clearly resolving the mystery of the "Y" in its name. By conjuring both the old and new versions of Ybor City, the play acts as a critique of Tampa's failure to preserve its unique history and identity.

1. Why the "Y" (in Ybor)?
American Theatre
January 1, 1995 | Anderson, Porter
It's a hot Saturday night in November, and the grand drag of Ybor City - Tampa's once-
revolutionary, turn-of-the-century cigar-manufacturing district - is receiving what Jackson
Browne would call "the benediction of neon light."
Eagle Talons cruise where Hav-a-Tampa once soared. Open-air bars thunder with bass
hooks where socialists once exhorted labor unionists to strike. Refugees from Florida's
sealed air-conditioned malls wear low-slung Calvins where gigolos once tipped fedoras to
pretty Latinas.
"We asked for this hard thing," recounts Val Day, artistic director of Tampa's site-specific
theatre company, the Hillsborough Moving Company, which recently mounted theatre poet
Mac Wellman's meditation on the city, Why the "Y" (in Ybor)? "We asked Mac Wellman for
a dramatic text on Ybor City's history and present." The play, commissioned and directed by
Day and company co-founder Susan Glass, features original music and new interpretations
of Ybor-themed music from the '20s through the '40s.
The project might be the latest chapter in Tampa's longest-running soap opera: "How to
Save Ybor (pronounced EE-bore) City." For decades there have been calls for the
renovation, restoration and rejuvenation of the bustling Cuban-Italian-Spanish splendor of
this fabled suburb, site of visits from Fidel Castro, Teddy Roosevelt and some of the
roughest riders of Hispanic-Floridian lore from the late 19th and early 20th centuries - and
nada.
Well, not quite nada. A few proud restaurants have persevered in the rundown storefronts,
along with a couple of party rentals in the great social clubs and old show buildings. Artists
have tried to turn old Ybor into a new bohemia, but failed because rental rates have been too
high. Some historic-landmark work has been done in fits and starts. A bust here. A plaque
there. But all Tampa's city council members and all the old town's friends have never really
been able to put Ybor City together again.

2. "Now," says Day, "Ybor's nothing but bars, ladies' nights, a Fat Tuesday, a Killian's. You pay
to park - $10 for the night. The man who once sold incense from bags on the street now has
three employees, he's a 'distributor.' The bums have gone corporate."
Cynicism. Bitterness. Greed. That's right. The avenging spirits of the New Age. For the non-
crystal non-pyramid New Age. Configured for holes, low places of the heart.
That's Deezo talking. He's Wellman's lead character, the chief seeker in Why the "Y", and,
Day suspects, "Deezo is also Mac himself, searching for the character who's looking for the
'Y' in Ybor."
The answer to the play's titular question, however, proved far harder to find than anyone
expected. "We had a political mission," Day admits. "We wanted to get the yuppies in and
send them home saying, 'You know, that's a lot like Ybor is today.' But we found that one of
the main themes of the play is secrecy, and revealing 'truth' that's not really truth."
Set high on the third-floor ballroom of Ybor City's once-proud Italian Club (founded in
1894, built in 1918), Why the "Y" hurls Deezo through an Inferno without a Virgil. The
arched windows are wide open to today's Ybor. Day, who mounted Wellman's Bad Penny on
Tampa's Hillsborough River and will stage Erik Ehn's new Video Reality in April, pulls
Wellman's Ybor text inexorably back into the old town's murky past - a place in which one
Charlie Wall, for example, is reputed to have been hired by Anglo Tampan city leaders to set
up a numbers game and hire affordable prostitutes to attract Latino cigar workers.
Originally titled Romantic Violence, the text was conceived as a free adaptation of
Aeschylus' Eumenides, a search for an Athenian way to embrace the Furies of corruption,
deceit and danger that bedevil Ybor so mercilessly. After all, "only love creates," as Ybor's
Jose-Marti, father of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, puts it in Wellman's history. But Day's
production suggests that one reason Ybor City may not be rising from its ashes, despite
everyone's good intentions, is that love seems to create very little there.
Klan-like "Zobops" appear in video sequences as ominous reflections of perverse town
governors in league with whores and gambling. They sneer at Deezo, "You've been split off
from me, like the short end of the human wishbone. Or the imaginary prong of the old
existential 'Y.'"
Cha-cha-cunning lighting
The temptress Marinette Bwa Chech (Theresa Lee), a soothsaying Mambo, turns up in
designer Katherine Hill's conga-drum costume to regale Deezo about old Ybor. Her satin

3. flashing under the gifted Gregory Szenas's cha-cha-cunning lighting, she tells Deezo, "One
newspaper said, 'Only way to stop the flood of spaghetti immigration is to prohibit sidewalk
fruitstands.'"
Three impeccably dressed alligators emerge from a gigantic cigar box bearing the ravishing
logo of a reptile-headed tuxedoed gent, the ultimate symbol of Old Floridian luxury. The
cigar brand here is Prince of Gators, and these princes dance, Astaire canes in hand, as they
speak of how "Holes cannot be the only things around. Simply put, all humans taste pretty
much the same."
Deezo, feeling that he indeed has fallen into a bottomless hole of Yborian confusion, finally
is told by the Mambo that Castro has flown to the North Pole, where he's having a tea party
with the Devil and "Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot, Frank Sinatra, Charlie Wall and Kim II
Sung of North Korea."
In the end, Wellman can celebrate Ybor's tobacco-scented cloud, but he can't penetrate its
mystery. The sum of all these elusive parts coalesce in Day's production to become a
powerful indictment of the abiding misery of Ybor and the fabulous failure of Tampans to
save their unique old city. The production ends with an elaborate musical number that
conjures the old salsa-rhythmic celebrations of Ybor and then overrides them with Susan
Glass's video of the new bar scene outside.
And yet, and yet.... After the show, you walk the "new" Seventh Avenue, Ybor's main street,
stepping between the cruising convertibles, around the drugged and drunken couples,
between the teens and behind the streetwalkers.
"You know," a friend says, "the irony is that this is what Ybor City was in its heyday."
And a "Y," Wellman has told us, is only "a fork in time."
Porter Anderson is a contributor to the Village Voice and managing editor of The Islander,
the newspaper of the Sea Islands of South Carolina.