| State Road 959 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Route information | ||||
| Maintained by FDOT | ||||
| Length: | 5 mi (8 km) | |||
| Existed: | 1980 – present | |||
| Major junctions | ||||
| South end: | US 1 / SR 5 in Coral Gables | |||
| North end: | SR 836 in Miami | |||
| Highway system | ||||
|
Florida State and County Roads
|
||||
State Road 959, known locally as Red Road and NW/SW 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 (SR 836) just south of Miami International Airport. Most of the current configuration of SR 959 is that of a two-lane undivided highway (except for north of US 41, where it becomes four-lane undivided) running through residential sections of Coral Gables, South Miami, West Miami, Westchester, and the Flagami section of Miami.
State Road 959 exists only south of Miami International Airport. In Hialeah, another Red Road (West Fourth Avenue) serves as a different state road, SR 823, which enters neighboring Broward County and stretches northward to Interstate 595 near Weston.
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 (6 km) longer as it stretched southward to the intersection of Red Road and Southwest 111th Street (Killian Drive), where it met the eastern end of SR 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.