History
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 (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.
Read more about this topic: Florida State Road 959
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Attributed to Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)