Tony Lombardo, Executive Director of Havana Main Street, wants to see Havana sparkle again.

On first glance strolling through downtown, not every building readily shows its 100 years worth of history, dating back to the late 1800s when Havana was the booming titan of the shade tobacco industry.

In the 1970s, foreign competitors eventually overtook that market, and Main Street underwent its first metamorphoses into an antique shopping destination. Then the recession hit in 2007. Many local businesses never fully recovered, and the area lost its shine.

Lombardo helped to form Havana Main Street in November 2017 to renew and transform downtown Havana’s economy once more, while preserving its historic foundation and legacy. Recognized by the Florida Main Street Program at the Florida Department of State, Lombardo alongside eight other directors, hope to build up businesses by making Havana into a bicycling destination.

Debuting the Havana Festival of Arts & Bikes this spring, they want to revitalize the area by merging the arts, murals, and the outdoors on May 11 and 12 to catapult the larger than life charisma inside this small panhandle town into the public’s eye.

“You don’t have strip malls or box stores, and that’s the charm of downtown Havana,” said Lombardo. “You have mom and pop industry where you come in and get personalized service. They know their customers their customers know them, just like how main streets were 50 to 75 years ago.”

As owner of Wanderings, a furniture, jewelry, and gift store, on Main Street for 25 years, Lombardo knows the value of both arts and crafts, as well as familycentric business. He established the store in 1993 as a way of anchoring his wanderlust filled daughter, Terri Paul, making Havana her home base and the store as a place to sell the handmade crafts she gathered on her travels.

Together, Lombardo and Paul traversed some of the most remote regions of the world, and brought back to Havana a wide array of unique goods. Interesting finds included hand carved pieces, figurines, and furniture from thePhilippines, Africa, and India, which were the core of Wanderings’ business for many years.

Backpacking through Thailand remains one of Lombardo’s most memorable journeys.Together, he and his daughter climbed mountains to reach tucked away villages,

used push-pull river skiffs along the river, and rode elephants from dwelling to dwelling. They spent evenings with locals, helped to grow corn, and sat with people who had not seen westerners in many years, if at all. Lombardo preferred the intimacy of these quiet communities that inadvertently shared qualities with Havana’s small-town heart.

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