businesses and shops that catered to cigar workers. By 1900, over 10,000 immigrants had moved to the neighborhood.
Several thousand more Cuban immigrants built West Tampa, another cigar-centric suburb founded a few years later. Between them, two “Latin” communities combined to exponentially expand Tampa’s population, economic base, and tax revenues, as Tampa became the “Cigar Capital of the World”. During the first few decades of the 20th century, the cigar-making industry was the backbone of Tampa’s economy. The military has also had an ongoing role in Tampa’s development. The city was the primary outfitting and embarkation port for U.S. troops bound for Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Today the U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command are headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base. The University of South Florida was established in North Tampa in 1956 and opened for students in September 1960. The school spurred the construction of several residential and commercial developments in the previously agriculture-dominated area around the new campus. The biggest recent growth in the city was the development of New Tampa, which started in 1988 when the city annexed a mostly rural area of 24 square miles between I-275 and I-75. Today, Tampa is the state’s third fastest-growing city, behind only Jacksonville and Miami. Physical development is at a fever pitch, with projects like the Westshore Marina District, Midtown Tampa and Water Street Tampa altering the layout and skyline of the city on a near daily basis. Innovation is now centered around the northern part of town, where researchers at the University of South Florida and medical institutions like Moffitt Cancer Center are finding answers to global problems.
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