One of my favorite historic buildings in all of Tampa is El Pasaje, (1310 E. Ninth Ave.) at the corner of Ninth Avenue and Avenida Republica de Cuba in Tampa's Ybor City. For five years, I spent most of my waking hours in that creaky and cantakerous old dame of a building when I worked first as managing editor and eventually as editor of the local alt weekly newspaper. But despite the long years and hard miles on her, she was always be beautiful and fascinating to me -- and worth all the trouble she could be.
Built in 1886 and modeled after an Italian Renaissance villa, El Pasaje was the second brick building in Ybor and remains one of the loveliest and most evocative spots in all of Tampa with its shady scalloped arcade in front and lush courtyard in back.
El Pasaje once housed a hotel and The Cherokee Club, a private gentlemen's enclave for the power elite. For 50 years, men announced their candidacy for governor in the club's second-floor ballroom. Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Jose Marti were among the hotel's guests. Marti is Cuba's most beloved revolutionary martyr. The apostle of Cuban independence from Spain, he spent a lot of time in Ybor City, working with labor leaders, lectors and newspaper editors to organize the resistance and raise funds and support for war. He was even poisoned here by Spanish loyalists, but survived to die fighting in one of the early battles of the war.
By the time I came to occupy the building, more than 100 years later in the 1990s the building was suffering from many years of disuse and neglect. The heating and air conditioning never worked very well. On especially cold winter mornings, I could see my breath while I typed away in my office. In storms, the electricity often blinked off, sending waves of cursing throughout the building as we lost whatever we were working on. As for the plumbing, you'd be lucky if the only problem was that the toilet wouldn't flush. If you weren't lucky, the bowl would overflow, and you'd have to hot foot it out of the bathroom before your shoes got soaked.
There were strange noises in the walls that I always thought were bats, and one particularly wet year, the entire first floor flooded, water seeping in through windows and under doors.
Some offices were dark and dank; others blinding heat boxes in the afternoon. But they also had exposed brick walls, huge arched windows and exquisitely crafted tile floors.
We shared the second floor with a lesbian bar called, in a delicious stroke of irony, The Cherokee Club. We had our staff meetings in the club's Bordello Room, a garish purple parlor with burgundy velvet settees, a pool table and chairs made to look like giant leopard high heel shoes. It was not a place for being conventional or pretentious. It reminded us that we had escaped the world of generic cubicles and fluorescent lighting, of lockstep thinking and rigid rules. It was a place to live up to, a perfect home for an alternative newspaper.
Staff Writer Dave Jasper spent the night once, in hopes of meeting El Pasaje's resident ghost and writing about the encounter for a Halloween issue. Other staffers sometimes stayed overnight in the offices rather than drive home after partying late in Ybor. Events Editor Cooper Cruz was robbed at gunpoint in the parking lot one night. Once we found a condom in the scrofulous old orange sofa in the editorial suite. It was the same sofa Janet Reno sat on when she visited during her campaign for governor.
The balcony overlooking our parking lot was the place to be during WMNF’s annual tribal music gathering Tropical Heatwave. In addition to having a great view of the action, we had our own keg and bathrooms that, cranky as they were, still smelled better than the Port-o-Lets cooking in the sun. One year, a stranger managed to sneak in. We let him stay until we found him in the archive closet, peeing into a plastic cup.
I occupied three different offices in El Pasaje as I climbed up the corporate ladder and back down. My favorite was a corner room with windows on the east and north sides overlooking a wrought iron balcony and inner courtyard. To me, it was one of the best rooms in the building, and I liked imagining Winston Churchill reading the paper and smoking a cigar, or Jose Marti planning Cuba libre, the liberation of Cuba, in the very spot where I sat.
Friday nights I usually worked late, and often, I'd be hunched over my computer, trying to figure out how to squeeze 32 pages of copy into 28 pages of paper while handsome lesbians toasted the weekend on the terrace outside my windows, and yuppies whooped it up in the courtyard below.
That's when I'd pour a shot of rum into my little china teacup and toast my fellow warriors: that ragtag band of oddballs, freethinkers and contrarians who worked so hard to put out a paper with an independent voice every week -- and the editors of those long-ago firebrand newspapers of Ybor City. I pictured them working late into the night 100 years ago so that the lectors could read to factory workers in the morning as they rolled cigars and planned a revolution.
El Pasaje is empty now and forlorn. No revolutionaries, no prostitutes, no musicians or lesbians or powerbrokers or journalists or bartenders ply their trades here now. It's just an old brick building that smells faintly of piss and history.
