Miami CVB & Ribbon Road Visitor Center

The Sidewalk Highway — also called Ribbon Road, the Miami-Afton 9-Foot Road, or simply the Sidewalk — is a 13-mile preserved section of the original 1922 Route 66 alignment between Miami and Afton in Ottawa County. The pavement is a single concrete strip 9 feet wide, the standard width for narrow pre-1929 highway construction in the era when motor vehicles were smaller and traffic volumes were lower. Two-way traffic on a 9-foot strip works only because vehicles must pull onto the shoulder (or the grass) when meeting oncoming traffic — which is precisely how it operated when it was the main highway through this part of Oklahoma in the 1920s.

The road was originally paved in 1922 as part of Oklahoma's earliest state-highway concrete construction program, predating the 1926 designation of Route 66 by four years. When Route 66 was officially designated in 1926, this segment became part of the original Route 66 alignment. In 1937 Route 66 was rerouted onto a wider, faster alignment running parallel to the original, and the 9-foot original was effectively abandoned as a primary route — but never demolished, never paved over, never built around. The road has been quietly drivable as a rural local road for nearly a century since it was bypassed.

What makes the Sidewalk Highway extraordinary is the combination of survival, authenticity, and accessibility. The concrete is the original 1922 pavement (with patches and repairs across the decades but with the original surface intact in most places), the alignment follows the original 1922 route through fields and farmland that look much as they did a century ago, and the road is genuinely drivable by ordinary passenger vehicles at slow speeds. There are only two comparable 9-foot pre-1929 Route 66 alignments preserved in the entire country — this one and a similar narrow strip in New Mexico — and this is the easier of the two to access for most travelers.

The visitor center's most-used resource for Sidewalk Highway visitors is the printed driving-directions map — a single-page guide showing the precise northern access point (just south of Miami at the intersection where the historic alignment splits from the modern Route 66 highway), the full 13-mile route through rural Ottawa County to the Afton southern access point, the recommended photo-stop GPS coordinates, and tips for navigating the narrow concrete strip including how to handle oncoming traffic and where the few sharp turns or rough patches are located. The map is free; staff will mark specific points based on the visitor's interests.

Staff also provide current pavement-condition reports — important because the Sidewalk Highway is rural local road maintained by the county, and conditions vary with weather and season. After heavy rains some sections develop muddy shoulders that make passing oncoming traffic difficult; after winter freeze-thaw cycles some patches develop cracks or potholes that require careful driving. The visitor center maintains current condition awareness through regular communication with local residents and county road crews, and the recommendation to skip the drive on a particular day is sometimes the most valuable information staff provide.

Beyond maps and conditions, staff brief visitors on practical Sidewalk Highway etiquette: drive 10 to 15 mph maximum, pull onto the shoulder when meeting oncoming traffic (whichever direction reaches a wider section first), watch for farm vehicles and local residents who use the road as a regular local route, and respect the surrounding private farmland (no trespassing onto adjacent fields for photographs). The 13-mile traverse takes roughly 45 minutes to an hour from end to end if you stop at the best photo points.

Picher, Oklahoma is one of the most haunting Route 66-adjacent sights in the country — an entirely abandoned former mining town 15 minutes north of Miami that was for decades one of the largest lead and zinc producers in the world before environmental contamination from a century of mining made the town uninhabitable. The visitor center provides Picher driving directions and a brief historical orientation, though the official position is cautious — visitors are welcome to drive through the abandoned town on public roads but should not enter abandoned buildings or wander into the contaminated chat piles (the mountainous piles of mining waste that surround the town).

Picher's peak population in the 1920s was around 14,000; today the town has effectively zero residents. The town was federally bought out in 2009 and 2010 under the Tar Creek Superfund cleanup program after decades of documentation showed that the soil, water, and air contamination from the lead and zinc mining operations had caused widespread health impacts on the resident population, especially children. The remaining buildings — schools, churches, houses, commercial structures — are abandoned but mostly still standing, creating a unique American ghost-town experience that has been documented in photographs, films, and journalism for decades.

Visitors who include Picher in their Miami-area itinerary typically allow 30 to 45 minutes for a drive-through, taking photographs from the road and stopping at the surviving Picher School building (the most photographed remaining structure). The visitor center provides background information that helps contextualize what visitors are seeing; without that context, Picher reads as simply an abandoned town rather than as the result of one of the most significant environmental remediation efforts in American history.

Spook Light Road — officially East 50 Road near Quapaw, about 20 minutes northeast of Miami — is the location of the long-documented Quapaw Spook Light phenomenon, an unexplained light that has been reported by witnesses since the 19th century. The light appears as a glowing orb of various sizes and colors that travels along the road at night, generally visible from a specific stretch where viewers park and watch toward the western horizon. Various scientific investigations have proposed explanations (refracted vehicle headlights from distant highways, atmospheric phenomena, geological emissions) without conclusively resolving the question. The visitor center provides directions and the recommendation to visit on a clear dark night for the best viewing chances — a fun supplementary activity for travelers spending an evening in Miami.

The Buffalo Ranch in Afton, at the southern end of the Sidewalk Highway, is the traditional companion stop to a Sidewalk Highway drive. The original Buffalo Ranch trading post opened in 1953 as a Route 66 tourist attraction featuring buffalo, longhorn cattle, and other Western animals; the original closed in the 1990s, and a smaller revived operation has periodically operated on the same site. The visitor center provides current information on whether the Buffalo Ranch is open during your visit (operating hours vary year to year) and on what else there is to see in Afton — most notably the Afton Station Packard Museum, an antique car museum focused on vintage Packard automobiles.

All three — Picher, Spook Light, and Buffalo Ranch — function as natural supplements to the core Miami day of Coleman Theatre, Waylan's, and Sidewalk Highway. The visitor center can help visitors prioritize based on available time, interests, and travel direction.

The visitor center is open Monday through Friday from 9am to 5pm. The center is closed on Saturdays and Sundays, which is a notable limitation for weekend Route 66 travelers — visitors arriving on a weekend should plan to either route their Miami visit for a weekday or rely on the visitor information available at the Coleman Theatre (which has Saturday hours during peak season) and at Waylan's Ku-Ku Burger (where the staff are knowledgeable about local Route 66 history). For Sidewalk Highway driving directions on a weekend, the printed maps and online resources from the visitor center website are the practical workaround.

Parking is available on North Main Street directly in front of the visitor center building (street parking is free in downtown Miami) and in a small public lot one block east. The center occupies a storefront on the ground floor of a historic downtown commercial building; it is wheelchair accessible from the Main Street entrance. Restrooms are available inside. The center is small (roughly 800 square feet) but staff are attentive and rarely overwhelmed even during peak Route 66 travel days.

The natural Miami day plan combines the visitor center stop with the rest of the downtown Miami attractions: arrive at the visitor center at 9am for maps and orientation, walk one block south to the Coleman Theatre for a 10am tour (when scheduled tours are running), continue a few blocks south to Waylan's Ku-Ku Burger for an early 11:30am lunch, then drive 15 minutes south to the northern access point of the Sidewalk Highway for the 45-minute drive to Afton. The full sequence — visitor center, Coleman Theatre, Waylan's, Sidewalk Highway, Afton — takes roughly 5 to 6 hours and constitutes the definitive Miami-area Route 66 experience.