Joe Marzo

By Joe Marzo Central Florida sits atop one of the richest phosphate deposits on Earth — a band of land stretching across Polk, Hillsborough, Hardee, and Manatee counties known as Bone Valley. For roughly 140 years this region has supplied a quiet but essential ingredient of modern life: the phosphorus that fertilizes the world's crops and that goes into animal feed, toothpaste, food preservatives, and a range of industrial products. The story of the industry is also the story of the land it...

By Joe Marzo When most people hear the phrase "Cigar City," they picture Ybor City — the cobblestone streets, the wrought-iron balconies, the Columbia Restaurant glowing on Seventh Avenue. Ybor gets the postcards, the historic landmark designation, and most of the tourists. But just across the Hillsborough River sits a neighborhood with a stronger claim to the title than its more famous neighbor. West Tampa was, after all, an independent municipality for thirty years, and at its peak it...

By Joe Marzo On the morning of March 1, 1908, a stiff easterly breeze blew across Ybor City, the cigar-making enclave just northeast of downtown Tampa. It was a Sunday, and the streets were quiet. Within a few hours, that quiet would shatter, and the densely packed wooden neighborhood that had grown up around the cigar factories of Vicente Martinez-Ybor would be reduced to smoldering rubble. By nightfall, more than fifty acres lay in ruins, thousands of immigrant workers were homeless, and...