Ybor City’s long-awaited $52 million boutique hotel now has a historic name to match its positioning on a historic block: Hotel Haya.
The name pays homage to one of Ybor’s founding fathers, Ignacio Haya.
The four-story hotel on the 1400 block of E. Seventh Avenue broke ground last year. Now its developers, Chicago’s Aparium Hotel Group, have announced it will open in the spring of 2020.
"Hotel Haya offers a rare opportunity to reflect on the deep layers and stories of one of America’s most unique, historic neighborhoods and bring new life into its future evolution in a very meaningful and purposeful fashion,” the hotel group’s co-founder, Kevin Robinson, said in a statement.
What will soon be a hotel of nearly 180 rooms was most recently a parking lot.
The block’s history is as packed as it is varied: It has been home to clubs with massive dance floors and famous drag shows. It once housed a gambling house and bordello run by Tampa crime boss Charlie Wall.
Ever further back, legend has it, a detachment of Teddy Roosevelt’s 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry rode horses into a restaurant’s dining room on the block before heading off to San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War.