More than 100 vendors, tattoo artists, taxidermists, cosplayers, and craftmakers are set to descend on Ybor City's historic Cuban Club this weekend for the Tabernacle of Oddities, a two-day market spread across all four floors of the 1917 building. The event runs Saturday and Sunday, and general admission tickets start at $16.
The festival is organized by Dysfunctional Grace, the Ybor City oddities shop known for its Ybor City Anatomy and Unnatural History Museum, as reported by Creative Loafing Tampa. Among the vendors listed for the weekend is Trent Alyse of Kitty Bomb Curios, one of the many taxidermists, entertainers, and craftmakers filling out the Cuban Club's four levels, per the same report. Ticket tiers for the weekend climb as high as $50 for a VIP pass granting full access to both days, according to Kaiju Big Battel's own event announcement.
A Historic Cigar-Worker Hall Hosts the Macabre
The venue itself carries its own layered history. El Círculo Cubano de Tampa, better known as the Cuban Club, is a four-story Neoclassical brick building completed in 1917 by architect M. Leo Elliott, who also designed Tampa City Hall, and the structure has been listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places since 1972, according to the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation. The building replaced an earlier wooden clubhouse that burned down in 1916, and it was originally built in 1902 as a mutual aid society offering health and social support to Cuban cigar workers, complete with a two-story theater, cantina, pharmacy, ballroom, bowling alley, and indoor swimming pool, per the Cuban Club's own historical account. That built-in multi-level layout is part of why the venue can absorb a sprawling market of more than 100 vendors across four separate floors.
Dysfunctional Grace's own roots trace back roughly 16 years to the second floor of an antique store in St. Petersburg, before the shop relocated to Ybor City's 7th Avenue around 2014, according to VoyageTampa. Owner Liz Furlong shifted into oddities curation full-time after being laid off from a corporate job, building a business around ethically sourced taxidermy, bone art, wet specimens, and antique funerary items, as WUSF reported; she had previously run a hair salon in Ybor City before opening the shop.
A Savannah True-Crime Museum Comes to Tampa
One of the weekend's marquee attractions is the traveling Graveface Museum, hosted from Savannah, Georgia, according to Creative Loafing Tampa. The museum was founded in Savannah in February 2020 by musician Ryan Graveface and Chloë Manon, operating out of a historic cotton warehouse along Factors Walk and focusing on macabre history, true crime, cults, and sideshow curiosities, per Roadtrippers. Graveface, also a guitarist for Black Moth Super Rainbow and owner of Graveface Records, expanded the museum to a second location in Chicago in 2022.
The Graveface collection traveling to Ybor City includes what's described as the world's largest archive of artwork and artifacts from serial killer John Wayne Gacy, alongside real evidence items connected to Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, according to a Freyzel Productions account of the exhibit.
Monster Wrestling Requires a Separate Ticket
Saturday night's headline entertainment comes from Kaiju Big Battel, the live-action performance act created in 1994 by Boston art student Rand Borden as a parody blending Japanese giant monster movies with Lucha Libre-style masked wrestling inside a ring surrounded by foam skyscrapers, per a history recounted by Campus Times. The odd spelling of “battel” reportedly began as a T-shirt typo that turned into a running inside joke for the group.
The Kaiju Big Battel show is set for 8 p.m. Saturday inside the Cuban Club's theater, and it requires a separate $20 ticket that is not included with general Tabernacle of Oddities admission, according to Kaiju Big Battel's event announcement. Attendees planning to catch both the vendor floors and the wrestling show will need to budget for both tickets separately.
Food, Tickets, and Getting There
Outside the Cuban Club, festivalgoers can grab plant-based options from food truck Vegan Gator or local Latin dishes from Barrios, with both vendors operating across Saturday and Sunday, per TicketsCandy's event listing. General admission tickets, which grant access to all four vendor-filled floors, start at $16 for single-day entry, while full-weekend VIP passes run up to $50.
The Cuban Club is located at 2010 N Avenida Republica de Cuba in Ybor City, and the venue can be reached at (813) 248-2954. It's the same historic hall that's hosted other community gatherings and entertainment over the years, a legacy that continues as Ybor City's dining and cultural scene keeps evolving nearby.
