Ybor updates: Sanchez y Haya restoration, Gasworx music venue

Ybor City’s J.C. Newman Cigar Co. is known as a maker and purveyor of fine cigars that you take your time smoking. But the family-owned and -operated cigar maker’s contractors are burning their way through the final phase of restoration of the historic Sanchez y Haya building like it’s a cheap White Owl. 

A mere four months after a Thanksgiving week 2025 groundbreaking ceremony marked the start of the last stage of a painstaking historic restoration project, fourth-generation J.C. Newman owner Drew Newman says work crews have reached the halfway point restoring the 116-year-old building’s historic features and design. Leading a tour in late March, Newman shows the restored brick-and-stucco facade and the historic wood doors and windows.

“We’re about six months away from bringing it back to life, and our only goal is to make it look and feel like it did 116 years ago,” he says.

In 1910, Ybor’s first cigarmakers, Ignacio Haya and Serafin Sanchez, opened the building as a restaurant, hotel, and boarding house for cigar workers at their El Reloj factory across the street and out-of-town visitors. Newman says over its “very colorful history,” the building has been a Prohibition-era speakeasy, grocery store, coffee mill, brewery, distillery, and “the seediest of dive bars in the 70s and 80s.” 

For decades, Sanchez y Haya stood vacant, boarded, and dilapidated. Then  J.C. Newman, which has owned and operated the historic El Reloj factory since moving to Ybor in 1954, purchased the building in 2020.

 “We realized if we didn’t restore it, nobody else was going to do it,” Newman says.

The plan is to open Sanchez y Haya by Thanksgiving 2026 and return to its original uses – a first-floor restaurant and lounge and a small hotel on the second floor with balcony views of El Reloj and downtown Tampa. Newman says The Sinclair Group, a family-owned midsized Tampa construction company specializing in historic renovation, is the contractor. Rowe Architects, a Tampa-based firm with extensive historic restoration experience that includes El Reloj, is the architect. Newman says the project is a balancing act that meets modern building codes while following historic preservation best practices.

Following the historic restoration of El Reloj and now Sanchez y Haya, J.C. Newman has already picked its next project, the restoration of a historic tobacco barn found in North Florida.   

For more information, go to J.C. Newman

Gasworx music venue

Real estate developer KETTLER has announced plans to open a 4,300-capacity music and entertainment venue in the mixed-use Gasworx district between Ybor City and Tampa’s Channel District in late 2028. 

The venue will be on North 15th Street, near Ybor’s Seventh Avenue corridor. Live Nation will operate it. 

“Ybor City has a distinct character and a long tradition of nightlife and live music,” KETTLER President of Development James Nozar says in a press release. “Our goal is to create a venue that carries that legacy forward by adding a new destination for residents, visitors, and artists. It will bring a distinct atmosphere to the neighborhood and give people another reason to experience Ybor and stay longer.”

In other Gasworx news, the district’s second residential development, the 390-unit luxury apartment community The Stevedore, opened at the beginning of April. Named for the longshoremen who were vital to late-19th-century Tampa’s economy, The Stevedore features studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments, a club lounge and resident bar, a parlor room with a fireplace, private co-work offices and executive conference rooms, a state-of-the-art fitness center and yoga studio, and a pet park.

For more information, go to The Stevedore and Gasworx