Florida State Road 959

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

State Road 959, known locally as Red Road and Southwest 57th Avenue, is a 5-mile-long, north-south street connecting U.S. Route 1 at the boundary between Coral Gables and South Miami, Florida, and the Dolphin Expressway (FL 836) just south of Miami International Airport. Virtually all of the current configuration of SR 959 is that of a four lane undivided highway running through residential sections of Coral Gables, South Miami, West Miami, Westchester, and the Flagami section of Miami.

When George Merrick made plans for the layout of Coral Gables in the 1920s he intended Red Road to be the western boundary of his planned city. The east-west Coral Way (later to be part of SR 972), the northeast-southwest South Dixie Highway (soon to be designated US 1), and the north-south Ponce de Leon Boulevard were intended to be main throughways, and the Tamiami Trail (soon to be part of US 94, which would in turn be folded into US 41 in 1949) was planned to be the northern boundary.

Red Road gets its name from the color of the mark Merrick made when he drew the road on his planning map; similarly, an east-west street was drawn in with a blue pencil and was named Blue Road.

Red Road received its FDOT SR 959 designation in 1980. Its original configuration was four miles longer as it stretched southward to the intersection of Red Road and Southwest 111th Street (Killian Drive), where it met the eastern end of FL 990 just outside the parking lot of the original Parrot Jungle, a major tourist attraction. Between 1995 and 2001, FDOT truncated several State Roads in Miami-Dade County, and both SR 959 and SR 990 were cut back to terminate at US 1. In 2002, Parrot Jungle closed its doors to its original home, moved to its present site on Watson Island, just off SR A1A, and became Parrot Jungle Island.

State Road 959 exists only south of Miami International Airport. In Hialeah, another Red Road (West Fourth Avenue) serves as a different state route, SR 823, which enters neighboring Broward County and stretches northward to Interstate 595 near Weston.

Florida State Roads
Preceded by 953	State Road 959	Succeeded by 968