The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

President John F. Kennedy was killed in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. The Warren Commission's report identified the Texas School Book Depository at 411 Elm Street, and the southeast corner of its sixth floor, as the place Lee Harvey Oswald shot from. The Secretary of the Interior designated the plaza a National Historic Landmark on October 12, 1993. The district takes in the 3.07-acre park, the buildings facing it, the triple underpass and the railroad switching tower.

The building is older than its notoriety. A plow company put up a five-story warehouse here in 1898, lightning burned it in 1901, and the present Romanesque Revival building rose on the old foundation by 1903. After the assassination the sixth floor stayed closed to the public for twenty-five years. An arson attempt in 1972 damaged part of the building, and a 1977 bond issue let Dallas County buy it after efforts to tear it down were blocked.

The first exhibit, John F. Kennedy and the Memory of a Nation, opened on February 20, 1989, after local resistance and fundraising trouble. The seventh floor was added in 2002. The museum's collections hold documents, photographs, newspapers, home movies and oral history interviews about the assassination, Kennedy's legacy and Dallas in the 1960s. Tickets are for timed entry, and the museum's website carries an interactive guide to the plaza outside.