Downtown Dallas is a hymn to commerce. Many of its
skyscrapers are landmarks in themselves; at night the red neon
Mobil Pegasus on the 1921 Magnolia Building on Akard and Commerce
streets appears to gallop over the city, while over two miles of
green argon tubing delineate the 72-story Bank of America building.
The original Neiman Marcus department store, set up in 1907
by sister and brother Carrie Neiman and Herbert Marcus and famed
for its glamorous Christmas catalog, is still there on Main Street
(Mon-Sat 10am-6pm, Thurs until 8pm). One refuge is the Center
for World Thanksgiving at Thanksgiving Square at the
intersection of Akard, Ervay and Bryan streets and Pacific Avenue
(Mon-Fri 9am-5pm, Sat & Sun 1-5pm), with its meditation garden,
fountains and modern spiraling chapel - though even here pealing
bells boom out at regular intervals. South of the square on Ervay
Street looms the precarious upside-down pyramid of City Hall
, possibly familiar as the police station in Robocop .
On the north edge of downtown, the Arts District boasts
the huge and wide-ranging Dallas Museum of Art , 1717 N
Harwood St (Tues-Sun 11am-5pm, Thurs until 9pm; free, around $5 for
special exhibits; tel 214/922-1200, ), which has plenty of European
works downstairs, including a good range of Mondrians, and an
especially impressive pre-Columbian collection in the Gallery of
the Americas upstairs. Two blocks east, at 2301 Flora St, the
magnificent Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center , designed by
I.M. Pei, is the home of the symphony orchestra. The vast
geometries of glass, onyx and wood inside cost $80 million, as the
tour guides won't let you forget.
Tourists flock to the restored redbrick warehouses of the
West End Historic District , the site of the original 1841
settlement on Lamar and Munger streets, for the eighty stores and
twenty restaurants here. The indoor marketplace has become
something of an amusement arcade, with a Planet Hollywood ,
tacky giftshops, crazy golf, and fast-food outlets.
A couple of blocks south and west of here lies Dealey
Plaza , forever associated with the Kennedy assassination. A
small park beside Houston Street's triple underpass, it remains
unchanged since the fateful day - in fact, since it was designed by
a committee which included LBJ, in the late 1930s - and must be one
of the most recognizable urban streetscapes in the world. The
Texas Schoolbook Depository itself, at 411 Elm St, is now
the Dallas County Administration Building, the penultimate floor of
which houses The Sixth Floor Museum (daily 9am-6pm; $9, or
$12 with audio tour; tel 214/747-6660 or 1-888/485-4854, ).
Displays build up a suspenseful narrative, with the infamous
blurred 8mm images of Kennedy crumpling into Jackie's arms left
until the end, at which point there's likely to be much sobbing
from moved visitors, who can exorcize their grief by writing in the
"memory book." The "gunman's nest" has been re-created and,
whatever you feel about Oswald's guilt, it is undeniably chilling
to look down at the streets below and imagine the mayhem the
shooter must have seen that day.
One block west of Dealey Plaza, in the Dallas Historical Plaza
on Main and Market streets, an open cenotaph, designed by Philip
Johnson and enclosing an 8ft flat granite block, stands as the
John F. Kennedy Memorial . Alongside, at 110 S Market St,
the Conspiracy Museum (daily 10am-6pm; $7) is a dreadful
waste of money. It strives to impress with its CD-ROM technology,
but in fact displays the usual amateurish hand-drawn diagrams and
wild accusations, interpreting virtually every public act in
America since the late 1950s as the work of the Professional War
Machine.
A little further south and east is the city's main business and
administrative district, focused around City Hall on Marilla
Street. Pioneer Plaza , at Young and Griffin streets, holds
the world's largest bronze sculpture, a monument to the cattle
drives that depicts forty longhorn steers under the guidance of
three cowboys.
You can see all of these and much more from the 51st-story
observation deck in the Reunion Tower , 300 Reunion Blvd
(daily 10am-10.30pm; $2), on the east side of downtown next to the
Amtrak station. The Dome Lounge , in the Tower, provides a
good place to sip some liquor.
Farther southeast, across I-30, near Harwood Street at 1717
Gano St, Dallas's first park, Old City Park , now serves as
both recreational area and museum, charting the history of the city
from 1840 to 1910 through more than thirty buildings relocated from
towns in north Texas, among them a farmhouse, a bank, a train
station, a store, a church and a schoolhouse (Tues-Sat 10am-4pm,
Sun noon-4pm; tours Tues-Sat 11.30am and 1.30pm, Sun 12:30pm and
2:30pm; $7; 214/421-5141, ).