Many residents of northwest Dade County remember this Army site with a big radar dome sitting out by itself in the undeveloped boonies west of Carol City from 1965 onward. The paved portion of Red Road used to end at NW 183rd Street and you had to turn east on NW 183rd Street to stay on paved roads and the Army facility was visible from the Red Road/NW 183rd Street intersection. If you went north on unpaved Red Road you could see the center better and if you turned left to the west on the unpaved NW 186th Street you came upon barbed wire fences with "U. S. Government Property - No Trespassing" signs along the right side. The facility was the HM-03 Integrated Fire Control center for the Nike missile base site located a mile further north, south of Snake Creek Canal, on land annexed by Miramar in the early 1970's. I used to try and use their small exchange at the center in the late 1960's when I was on active duty in the USCG but they were always closed when I went there and I never got onto the base. On several occasions, after showing my military ID, I spoke at length through the fence with the armed Army sentries who were friendly but they offered few details about their assignments and we talked about their hometowns and what they did in Miami when off-duty. I did learn from them that the actual missiles were located one mile north just south of the Snake Creek Canal but I never visited that site while it was operational.

The Army ended their air defense missile presence in South Florida in 1979 and the IFC's were closed forever. The U. S. Navy bulldozed the old Army buildings, built new buildings and moved from their valuable Naval Reserve Center on Tigertail in Coconut Grove to the former Army site in the 1990's as I recall and Naval and Marine Corps reserve units operate on this site. The Navy Operations Support Center has a Hialeah Post Office mailing address and they use Hialeah in their name but it is located miles north of Hialeah and is actually in unincorporated Miami-Dade County, west of Carol City, and 19 blocks north of the Town of Miami Lakes town limits. I could be wrong but I suspect that Joella C. Good Elementary School and possibly the Country Walk Park, both immediately west of the former Army IFC, were part of the Army's property and were donated by the federal government to the county for utilization as a school site and park site. If it wasn't for the federal government donating former federal airfields, missile sites and other property this county would be even harder up for places to put universities, junior colleges, schools and parks because they've never had a land bank program in place for future use. Just about everything is being paved over and the amount of open space, such as preserves, is minimal in many areas of the county.