Downtown Dallas and JFK Assasination Tour

Arriving into Downtown Dallas.

JFK Memorial Plaza in the centre of the city, located just off Main Street (where I will begin my tour). This is designed specifically so that it is wonderfully peaceful and silent inside the concrete plaza walls, just as JFK would have liked it, still able to see glimpses of the city but with a country feel.

The Pegasus – A Dallas landmark logo – where everything is BIG!

The Old Red Museum… formerly the Old Red Courthouse. Beautiful building in the centre of Dallas right next to the JFK Memorial.

Stepping onto the bus, our tour guide, Rachel.

Gotta get in the Dallas swing-of-it and be a proper cowgirl!

Found me a heard o’ Longhorns at Pioneer Plaza!

Klyde Warren Park, over 5 hectares of parkland built right over the freeway… the freeway goes down into a tunnel so the park can be right up on top. Food trucks have 1 year leases for their place around the edges of the park and there are hundreds of them!

(Its a nice day for a white wedding..)

Churches galore!

This one in particular cracked me up.. along the base edge of the fountain is quoted from The Bible John 4:14 “14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will not thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

….but check out the sign at the back of the monument..!

There’s lots in Dallas to see… and lots seeing you too..!

Neiman Marcus, the first department store in America to introduce window dressings and displays.

We are heading down Main Street, about to embark on the exact route that JFK’s Presidential Car travelled on that fateful day back on November 22nd 1963.

Picture the crowds cheering and waving placards welcoming the President…

Traveling slowly down Main Street, past the Courthouse and statue of George Bannerman Dealey….

Continuing along Main Street, passing the Texas School Book Depository…

….and there it is, the two crosses in the middle of Main Street marking the two shots, the first from the 6th floor window of the The Book Depository…

…the second -fatal- shot from quite possibly the grassy knoll by the wooden picket fence…

As the Presidential motorcade (and in 2017, our tour bus) continued on through the triple underpass, gaining speed.

There is silence on our bus as the famous scene of Jackie Kennedy climbing over the back of the Presidential Car to escape the bullets and seek help for her wounded husband is relived by all.

As we are informed of all the uncanny coincidences between JFK and Lincoln, we head toward our next destination…

…the rooming house where Lee Harvey Oswald was living and ran home to immediately following the shooting…

I find a friend to greet me

Eerily, this part of the house (the living room, lounge area and Oswald’s bedroom) have been left exactly as they were that day in 1963…

Funnily enough, I was the only person on the tour willing (brave enough?!) to lay on the exact bed that Lee Harvey Oswald spent his last night alive in… all the Americans on the tour were covered in goose-bumps merely being in that house and too scared to touch a thing.

Actual newspapers from the days following the assasination.

John F Kennedy Memorial Certificate.

A copy of the Dallas Morning News published on November 23rd 1963 (the day after the Assasination of President Kennedy).

Rachel, our guide, allowed me a quick private tour while the others headed back to the bus and she completed the required paperwork.

The outside of the rooming house. Beautifully spooky, especially knowing through those doors, the house is literally frozen in time.

Next we are taken to where Oswald allegedly randomly shot Officer J.D. Tippit. He had apparently run back to the rooming house, grabbed his pistol and a jacket and hat and probably taken a cab to this part of town, and when approached by Officer Tippit, drew his weapon in front of people and shot three times to the head, before fleeing on foot…