After 128 Years of Rolling Them, Tampa Is Close to No Cigars

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/22/us/after-150-years-of-rolling-them-tampa-is-close-to-no-cigars.html

After 128 Years of Rolling Them, Tampa Is Close to No Cigars

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ JULY 21, 2014

TAMPA, Fla. — Some unforgettable places waft into memory on a scent. For Floridians, it may be the sweetness of mangoes in Miami, the salt-sprinkled air of the Keys, the pungency of the Everglades.

In Ybor City, a neighborhood in Tampa, history is cloaked in the woody, earthen notes of a cigar, the product that helped define this once-quiet town and propel it well into the 20th century. Today, the 150 cigar factory sites that dotted this historic neighborhood once redolent with the aroma of tobacco have faded away, one by one, done in by cigarettes, health concerns, the trade embargo on Cuba and competition from abroad. Many were torn down; others stand there empty or recycled for more profitable ventures.

There is one exception: On the northern side of Ybor City sits the J. C. Newman Cigar Company factory, a family-owned business tucked inside a classic brick building nicknamed El Reloj, a nod to its clock tower. Both have defied the maw of modernity to outlive a century.

But now J. C. Newman faces its biggest threat: the possibility that the Food and Drug Administration may introduce strict, expensive regulations on cigars that the Newman brothers, who operate the company, say could close the last working cigar factory in town.

“We have gone through two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Cuban trade embargo, smoking bans, excessive taxation and competition from low-wage countries,” said Eric Newman, who with his brother Bobby, owns and operates the country’s oldest premium cigar business, founded in 1895 in Cleveland by his grandfather Julius Caeser Newman. “The toughest challenge of all these is the F.D.A. regulations.”

If the factory closes, Tampa would lose its most historic link to the city’s 128-year-old cigar legacy, a blow that many agree would be deeply felt. It is not hard to see why. Inside El Reloj, cigar workers, most of them women, sit behind 1930s-era machines and lay a long tobacco leaf on a metal plate, cutting it before it slides off to be rolled. In another room, women push pedals on machines from the 1910s that strip the stem from the leaf (the women are indelicately called strippers). The process has not changed since the 1930s when Mr. Newman’s grandfather bought his first set of machines; two decades later he moved his cigar factory to Ybor City from Cleveland.