Customer Reviews

Ybor City Chronicles: A Memoir

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I know a good book when I read one. Ybor City Chronicles is a excellent one. This book delivers a fresh new look at Ybor City that no one has ever seen before! It is comical and serious, yet it still gives you an inside look to the city of Ybor. In addition, it provides wonderful profiles of Ybor's most powerful people. Once I read this novel I honestly felt like I knew so much more about the city I grew up in (Tampa/Ybor). I recommend this book to anyone who wants a new perspective of this sun-bathed city.

Ferdie Pacheco's Ybor City Chronicles, A Memoir reminded me of Ybor City's famed Cuban bread loaves from La Segunda Central Bakery- Crusty on the outside, yet soft, warm and filling on the inside. His true to life memoir has its hard, crusty edges when it details the deaths of Ybor City founders and characters. He balances this by giving us details of the loving, trusting, yet proud feelings of the many Ybor City founders had toward their young children and families. This book contains many rare photographs of many Ybor City founders and their families as well as sketches by Ferdie Pacheco himself. Though the individual essays contain excellent characterizations, I wish the book had been written in a more chronological order as it can become unwieldy trying to keep all the founding families and historical events in order. I would recommend this book for those who want a peek at a multicultural, self started city-within-a city during the depression era that was Ybor City.

If you have interest in Ybor City (a highly cultural section of Tampa), you ought to give this book a read. Lots of neat stories and tidbits about the area, the cigar industry, and Ybor's heritage. Even today, Ybor City still exudes that same Cuban & cigar culture that Tampa was built on. Ybor's a Tampa treasure that's been preserved, and it's a very proud part of the bay area.

I am a native to the Tampa area and have family members who had very strong ties to Ybor City in "the day". Ybor City enjoys an extremely diverse and interesting history. The book captures the diversity of cultures and people of Old Ybor. Ybor City is now known more for its "entertainment" but the very rich heritage of the town should be perpetuated. This book is a wonderful way of getting a glimpse of life during that time. As the author states in the front of the book, It is "his truth". Having been exposed to the culture, I know what he says is true. This book is by no means a dry documentary. It is almost a collections of vignettes. Definitely worth the read.