Ybor City's Fall Shuffle: New Doors, Same Names

Lynn Kroesen has a phrase for the Ybor City Saturday Market: an incubator without walls. She means it as a description of vendors testing out recipes and jewelry designs under a pop-up tent at Centennial Park, seeing what sticks before they risk a lease. This fall, on and around 7th Avenue itself, three separate businesses proved her right in a bigger way than the phrase probably intended.

None of it reads as turnover from the outside. A cigar bar is doubling its footprint two blocks from where it opened in 1998. A brewery just said goodbye to the only home it had known for seventeen years, and the goodbye sounds like a closing but is really a return, because the founder is about to rent space from himself. A bookstore that opened this summer spent two years selling out of a folding table at the same market Kroesen runs before it ever had a storefront. Read separately, these are three unrelated local news items. Read together, they say something about how this particular neighborhood tends to replace what it loses: mostly from the inside.

The Brewery That Moved Back In With Itself

Cigar City Brewing built its name a few miles from Ybor, at 3924 W. Spruce Street, starting in 2009 under founder Joey Redner. It grew into one of the region's best-known breweries, distributing across six states, before Redner sold his controlling shares in 2016. The company that bought it eventually became CANarchy, and Monster Beverage Corporation acquired CANarchy in 2022. Along the way, last year brought a round of layoffs at the Tampa operation that included longtime brewer Wayne Wambles.

Spruce Street's last day of service was September 20, sent off with vintage bottle pours, food from This Little Pig, and pop-ups from Flour Hustler and Signature Popcorn. What comes next is where the story turns local. Cigar City isn't relocating to a new landlord's building. It's moving its original 15-barrel brewhouse into Redner's own Cigar City Cider & Mead space at 1812 N. 15th Street in Ybor, a building that already sits on a piece of Tampa brewing history as the former home of Tampa Bay Brewing Company. Redner's father still owns the Spruce Street building the brewery is leaving. Redner himself owns the one it's moving into.

That detail matters more than it looks like it should for anyone who used to treat Spruce Street as a regular stop. The company's own site says the new Ybor location is still under construction, with a target of welcoming people back "later this year" and no firm reopening date yet. For now, the only public Cigar City pours in Tampa are at its outpost locations, at Amalie Arena and inside Tampa International Airport. Anyone expecting a same-week handoff should plan for a gap instead.

Two Blocks From Its Own Original Location

King Corona has held its corner of 7th Avenue, at 1523 E. 7th Avenue, since 1998, long enough that locals refer to the block as La Séptima without translating it. Current owner Ivan Kalasho isn't opening a second brand nearby. He's building King Corona 1902, a 12,000-square-foot cigar lounge and members-only floor at 1902 E. 7th Avenue, two blocks from the original storefront, with a target opening in November.

The build-out gives some sense of scale for a neighborhood used to King Corona as a single-room fixture:

• A downstairs bar and coffee bar open to the public, including a full roasting station
• Roughly 500 lockers for cigar storage on the public floor
• An upstairs members-only lounge with about 100 additional executive lockers
• A 1,000-square-foot balcony overlooking 7th Avenue

Construction was underway as of early September, and Kalasho has said the everyday food program isn't finalized, though the kitchen is built for private events. The original 1523 location stays open the entire time, which means regulars aren't choosing between an old spot and a new one this fall. They're watching one business become two on the same block it's occupied for 28 years.

The Bookstore the Market Grew Itself

Before Bookends: Literature and Libations had an address, it had a folding table. Sisters Laurie and Teresa Rodriguez, both Tampa natives, ran a mobile bookstore and worked community markets around the region, including regular Saturdays at the Ybor City Saturday Market, where they built a following long before they signed a lease.

The storefront itself took three years. The Rodriguez sisters started restoring a historic Ybor cottage in the summer of 2022, soft-launched on June 27, 2026, and held their official opening in July. The shop pours coffee, wine, and beer alongside its shelves, and hosts author talks, book clubs, tarot sessions, and craft nights on a regular schedule. Earlier this month, during Women's Business Month, Bookends received a $5,500 in-kind marketing grant from the Working Women Foundation and its partners, the kind of support aimed at getting a new storefront's name in front of people who don't already know it.

This is the part of Kroesen's line about the market that's easy to say and harder to actually watch happen: a vendor under a tent becomes a name on a door two blocks away, on 2nd Avenue, without ever leaving the neighborhood that built its first customers.

What Changed, Where to Find It Now

Line them up and the pattern isn't outside capital moving in to replace what Ybor already had. It's the opposite. A founder is becoming his own landlord instead of signing with someone new. A 28-year-old cigar retailer is expanding down its own block instead of opening across town. A market that's spent 24 years calling itself a launching pad produced an actual storefront this year, on schedule with its own stated purpose.

None of that means the fall is friction-free. If Spruce Street was part of your routine, there's a real stretch this fall and winter with no public Cigar City taproom in Tampa proper. If you were counting on King Corona 1902 for a November event, construction timelines have a way of sliding past the month they're announced in. The Saturday Market at Centennial Park, at least, keeps running the way it always has, every Saturday, rain or shine, which is probably still the best place to see what gets a storefront next.

If you're already circling 7th Avenue waiting on Cigar City's reopening date or watching the scaffolding go up at 1902, Kim Guillory keeps an eye on Ybor's back-and-forth the same way she keeps an eye on the rest of Tampa Bay, one neighborhood conversation at a time. If there's a corner of Ybor you think deserves the same close look, that's a conversation worth starting.