Monday, March 9, 2015

Roads to Nowhere

• In Bithlo, there are sections of County Road 13 that were long ago discontinued and abandoned. One is north of Wedgefield (seen above) and another (seen below) is in the Cypress Lakes subdivision.

• In Osceola County, there's a twenty-mile section of U.S. 192/SR 500 that was abandoned in the late 1940s (below). The land is private property, but boy, wouldn't it be something to drag race on.

• In Longwood, there's a long-abandoned, unfinished section of Miami Springs Drive (see below) that passes Wekiva Island and goes over a creek, into... nowhere.

• The former town of Brewster is now a ghost town. Not many of its buildings remain, but a few do, most notably the giant smokestack from its American Cyanamid chemical plant. It was once a thriving town with its own schools, movie theater, post office, etc. but after an environmental disaster, American Cyanamid was forced to close and the entire town was deeded over to the state. Brewster's roads are still barely there, in utter disrepair but still sort-of accessible off Old Highway 37 if you know how.

• Highway 129 was built in the 1930s and then a portion of it was completely abandoned when a new highway in the 1980s made it obsolete. Much of it can be still discerned in the forests that have grown up around it, and there's a great YouTube video here that shows a stretch of it in the vicinity of Live Oak, FL. It's taken heading north off the Suwannee Springs Bridge, on the Suwannee River.

• This section seen below of Old Highway 4 in the Florida Keys near Marathon is crumbling rapidly but is still there. As concrete in America is made with rebar reinforcement, this road is doomed like nearly all buildings in America. Moisture inevitably finds its way into the rebar where it rusts and begins to expand, eventually destroying the structure entirely. This highway is inaccessible by car today and nearly inaccessible on foot as well.

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