Talk:Guavaween

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article needs work / incorrect history of Ybor City[edit]

There's a lot of unsourced and confusing text in the article right now. I'll start the process cleaning it up, and hopefully other interested editors can continue and add more info, as I'm not exactly an expert on Guavaween per se.

However, I am a bit of an expert on local history, and I must point out that the origin of Tampa's "Big Guava" nickname previously related in this article was sadly incorrect. As it now (correctly) reads, Gavino Guiterrez was working for a New York fruit company and came to Tampa looking for wild guava trees. He didn't find enough trees to be worth his while, but he did recommend Tampa to Vicente Martinez-Ybor, setting the stage for Ybor City. He was not a "Tampa pioneer", and he didn't try to start a guava plantation only to be thwarted by "climate and rising land prices". Actually, he used his training as a civil engineer and went to work for Sr. Ybor laying out the streets and generally helping to plan the new settlement.

Apparently, the incorrect information originated in this poorly researched St. Pete Times article about Guavaween from 1999. The exact wording from that report was repeated in this wikipedia entry until today, and it can be found faithfully copied onto various other sites regarding Guavaween, all incorrect. The real story can be found in any book on the history of Tampa and/or Ybor City, and also online in this lesson plan from the Ybor City State Museum and this document on the City of Tampa website, among other places.

Sorry for the rant, but this is why wikipedia needs to be as accurate as possible. Just a couple of inaccurate sentences from a supposedly reputable source can lead to bad information being copied all over the place online. Zeng8r (talk) 01:45, 15 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]