Palmetto Beach makes tobacco history

TAMPA (TBO.com) For more than a century, La Mega cigar factory has towered over the Palmetto Beach neighborhood, a few miles east of downtown.
The factory once employed hundreds of people who lived in its shadow. Now it's a shadow of its former self — abandoned, its windows shrouded in plywood. By the front steps, a weathered, warped sign offers a promise of condos.
"I'd like them to do something with that building," said Jacinto Simon, who moved to Tampa from Cuba 40 years ago. He lives next to the ghostly factory.
La Mega stands at the center of the new Palmetto Beach Historic District, which was added last month to the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places. Continued