Exclusive from INSIDE magazine
THE STRAZ CELEBRATES 30 YEARS
The Man Behind the Mission
Gov. and former Tampa mayor
Bob Martinez
on growing up Tampanian,
the creation of The Straz and what
it meant for the growth of Tampa
This season, we celebrate 30 years of The Straz. As part of this celebration, we are gathering our
stories, and we decided that we might as well start at the beginning – with Bob Martinez.
Martinez’s grandparents came to Tampa from Spain, mingling with the other immigrant cultures
of Ybor City and West Tampa – Italians, Cubans and Germans – and, like those new Americans,
Martinez’s grandparents joined the mutual aid societies of the area.
As worker-centered social clubs, the mutual aid societies came to represent the hard-working
and community-centered ethos that would dominate Tampa until the abrupt socio-economic
changes of the mid-20th century. Part of the vital fabric of the mutual aid societies was culture.
“I grew up here, so I went to live productions all the time,” Martinez says. “We had live talent at
the mutual aid societies, and I was taken to all the shows at fi ve and six years old even though I
probably fi dgeted through most of them.”
Dirt roads led in and out of his neighborhood, near where Raymond James Stadium sits today. To
get to any excitement, Tampanians boarded a streetcar that would click and clack to the action:
downtown. “In the ‘40s and ‘50s, the entertainment center was downtown Tampa,” he recalls.
I probably got it in my mind that anything that would happen for Tampa would happen
downtown.”
By the 1970s, Martinez, who had been a much-loved high school teacher, bought Café Sevilla,
a Spanish restaurant with a reputation for attracting a who’s-who from business, politics and
entertainment. “If any famous actors were in town fi lming a movie, somebody would bring them
by Café Sevilla,” Martinez says. “We had Ricardo Montalban, Vikki Carr, Fernando Lamas.” People
knew Bob Martinez, and a month after he took over the restaurant, then-Governor Reubin
Askew called Martinez to serve on the board of Southwest Water Management District.
The call jump-started Martinez’s political life, and, in 1979, he announced his mayoral bid. The
major focus of his platform?
“I announced I wanted to build a performing arts center. Downtown.”
Martinez, who would later advance to Governor of Florida and eventually serve as Drug Czar
under President George H.W. Bush, saw that the downtown Tampa of his youth had stagnated,
mired in random industrialization and unable to revitalize after the cigar industry collapsed.
“In July of ’79, I released three white papers, the fi rst one explaining how job creation and
economic development were tied to the performing arts center. You see, in order to attract new