The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey PlazaThe Kennedy assassination told from the sniper's perch — the former Texas School Book Depository overlooking Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy's motorcade turned off Houston Street onto Elm through Dealey Plaza, and shots fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository killed the president and wounded Texas Governor John Connally. The warehouse building stood vacant and threatened with demolition for years before Dallas County preserved it; the museum opened on the sixth floor in 1989, deliberately leaving the rest of the structure as county offices.

The permanent exhibit, 'John F. Kennedy and the Memory of a Nation,' walks chronologically through the early 1960s, the Kennedy presidency, the Dallas trip, the assassination itself, the Warren Commission and later investigations, and the decades of cultural aftermath. Nearly 400 photographs, six films, and artifacts line the route, but the emotional center is the southeast corner window: the sniper's perch is reconstructed behind glass with the stacked book cartons exactly as they were found, and the plaza spreads out below exactly as it looked that day.

Outside, Dealey Plaza is itself a National Historic Landmark District — the grassy knoll, the triple underpass, the Bryan Pergola where Abraham Zapruder filmed his home movie, and the white X's painted on Elm Street marking the shot locations. Allow 90 minutes to two hours for the museum and the plaza, book a timed ticket ahead, and note that photography is not allowed in the sixth-floor galleries.