At 1906 North Armenia Avenue in West Tampa, a three-story brick building put up in 1904 once employed more than a thousand workers rolling cigars under brand names like Optimo, whose customers reportedly included Winston Churchill and Babe Ruth. Today the same 58,650-square-foot building — its rows of tall, arched factory windows still doing the job they were built for, flooding the old rolling floors with natural light — holds something different: roughly 30 working studios and an exhibition space known as Santaella Studios for the Arts.
The building’s history goes back to Antonio Santaella, a Spanish immigrant from Seville who partnered with Sol Hamburger of Bavaria; the two began making cigars together in Key West before relocating operations to Tampa. After fire destroyed an earlier structure on the same lot, the replacement building that opened in October 1904 was, at the time, the largest cigar factory in West Tampa. By 1918–1919, the factory was producing more than 45 million cigars a year and, by the early 1920s, the wider A. Santaella & Co. operation employed over a thousand workers across all its factories. Ownership changed hands over the following decades — Universal Cigar Corporation bought the building in 1955 — before the Ellis and Van Pelt families purchased it in 1997 and, a decade later, converted part of it into what was first called the West Tampa Center for the Arts.
What’s inside now is a genuine working collective rather than a curated museum floor. Resident artists past and present have included painters, photographers, printmakers, and jewelry designers — among them Stacy Larsen, Alex Espalter-Torres, Lynn Manos, James Oleson, Laszlo Horvath, Debra Radke, and Laura Gattis Photography. The studio’s own site lists around 27 tenants, most of them working artists, sharing a building designed a century ago to house tradespeople — just with paintbrushes and cameras instead of cigar rollers now.
The space isn’t set up as a daily walk-in gallery; the most reliable way to see inside is to catch one of the periodic open houses the collective has hosted, which have combined live music, food, and wine with the chance to walk the actual studio floors and meet the artists at work — worth watching the studio’s Facebook page or santaella.weebly.com for the next date rather than assuming a specific recurring schedule, since none is published in writing.