$18.5M historic Ybor City building restoration in final stages

It has been a grocery store, a distillery, a coffee mill, a knitting shop and even a speakeasy during Prohibition. In its final years, it was a seedy, often bloody dive bar called the Chip-Inn. But for the past few decades, the 115-year-old Sanchez y Haya building has simply been a crumbling, empty relic of Ybor City’s cigar-fueled heyday.

That was before the building caught the attention of its neighbor across the street, the owner of the iconic “El Reloj” clocktower factory of the J.C. Newman Cigar Company. Now, the Newman family, which operates the oldest working cigar factory in the U.S., is entering the final stages of an $18.5 million restoration effort of the Sanchez y Haya property that began in 2023, they say.