Cigar City: Tales From a 1980s Creative Ghetto, is a collection of linked short stories about the young artists, writers, poets, musicians and actors who inhabited Tampa’s Ybor City in the 1980s. Drawn by urban authenticity and cheap rents, they created a surreal, chaotic arts scene set against the backdrop of the empty cigar factories and shotgun shacks of Tampa’s immigrant past. Ybor drew international artists like James Rosenquist, Jim Dine and dozens more, and mirrored what was happening in New York’s Alphabet City.The stories are fictional but they capture the spirit of the district during the 1980s. The collection is illustrated with photos from the era by Bud Lee and David Audet.
