City will cover Ybor red bricks

When city workers began tearing up sections of Fourth Avenue for repaving a few weeks ago, they uncovered miles of well-preserved red bricks beneath the asphalt.

The discovery prompted a series of discussions between Ybor City preservationists and city officials about whether the bricks could be restored instead of paved over.

In the end, Tampa officials said the cost of repairing the bricks, estimated at more than $1 million, would be too much to justify given the city's troubled financial outlook.

On Monday, workers will begin repaving the avenue from Nuccio Parkway to 30th Street.

Preservationists say the move amounts to covering over an important piece of Ybor's history and want the city to leave the road alone until money is available to restore the bricks.

"This is a tragedy," fumed Fran Costantino, president of the East Ybor Neighborhood Association. "The city is basically saying that our history is too expensive to preserve."

Ybor City is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, a protected designation that includes a section of the Fourth Avenue corridor from 22nd Street to 26th Street.

Public Works director Irvin Lee couldn't be reached for comment.

Vince Pardo, manager of the Ybor City Redevelopment Corp., the city-funded agency that oversees redevelopment in the historic district, said his hands are tied.

"Unfortunately, it looks as though the city is going to go forward with it," he said.

Pardo said the city has been planning to repave the avenue for several years because residents and business owners had complained about potholes and cracking asphalt.

The $230,000 project is being funded with Community Investment Taxes, he said, but the public works department didn't budget enough to pay for restoring the bricks.

Ybor officials were not aware that the grading of the road would go down as far as it did, Pardo said, or that the bricks underneath had been preserved as well as they were.

"If we'd known about it, we certainly would have taken a different approach," he said.

Red-brick streets once lined Tampa's neighborhoods from Port Tampa to Palma Ceia, from Ybor City to West Tampa. Rivaled only by old oak trees that reach over their paths, the brick streets gave these neighborhoods a timeless charm, old-time residents say.

The brick roads date back to the early 1900s, when Tampa was emerging as the top cigar-making city in the country. Throughout the years many of them have been paved over, but the city still maintains more than 50 miles of brick streets, most of them in Ybor.

There are no regulations that prohibit the city from paving over brick, although preservationists and elected officials have made attempts to protect them.

In the early-1980s, then-city council member Helen Chavez led an ill-fated movement to preserve the city's brick roads and attempt to uncover those paved over with asphalt.

Tony LaColla, president of the Historic Ybor Neighborhood Civic Association, said given the impact of the recession on the city's finances, restoration of the bricks is unlikely.

"As much as I'd like to see all of the red brick roads in Ybor City restored, unfortunately that's just not financially feasible at this time," he said. "It's just too expensive."