One hundred and thirteen miles of two-lane laid across open water, from Key Largo to the end of the road. The green mile markers count you down the whole way — and there is a story under every number.
Forty-two bridges tie seventeen hundred islands to the mainland. For long stretches the highway is the only dry thing in sight — a ribbon of asphalt between the Atlantic and the Gulf, driven at the speed of the car in front of you, best at the hour the water turns to gold.
Before the highway there was a railroad — Flagler’s Overseas Railroad, finished in January 1912 by convict crews and recruited immigrants working over open water. On Labor Day 1935 a Category 5 hurricane put two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds over the middle Keys. The rescue train sent down for the veterans building the road’s bridges was swept off the track; more than four hundred people died, two hundred and sixty of them veterans. The railroad never ran again.
The state bought the drowned right-of-way for $640,000 and paved it. The old rails came up and went back down as guardrails. On March 29, 1938, Route 1 reached Key West — a toll road then, a dollar a car and a quarter a passenger, collected at Pigeon Key. People have been driving it for the light ever since.
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