Joe Marzo

By Florida Files Staff Tampa in the early nineteen hundreds was an industrial crossroads filled with cigar smoke, immigrant ambition, and a deep tension that lay just below the surface. Ybor City and West Tampa had become enclaves filled with Spanish, Cuban, and Sicilian laborers who arrived seeking the promise of steady work and a life far removed from the poverty and political chaos of Southern Italy. But Tampa’s Anglo establishment did not welcome them as equals. Old fears, newspaper...

By Joe Marzo When Americans picture the First Thanksgiving, they usually think of Pilgrims and Wampanoag gathered around a long wooden table in the cool New England autumn of 1621. The image has become a national myth—an origin story built around gratitude, peace, and the birth of an American tradition. But that story leaves something important out. The real first Thanksgiving happened fifty-six years earlier, not in Massachusetts but on the sandy shores of Florida. A Different Beginning In...

By Joe Marzo Credit : Florida Memory Rum, Rebellion, and the Wettest Spot in the South When the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect in 1920, Florida’s west coast should have gone dry. Instead, it only got wetter. Across the Tampa Bay area, from the smoky cigar lounges of Ybor City to the Greek sponge docks of Tarpon Springs, prohibition was more suggestion than law. Geography, culture, and commerce conspired to make Tampa Bay one of the most notorious rum-running hubs in the South. It was a...