Dallas

Top things to do in Dallas

1. 01

   The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza - the assassination, told inside the building

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   The old Texas School Book Depository now holds a museum on the floor the shots were fired from, with the corner window preserved behind glass and the whole story - the motorcade, the Warren Commission, the conspiracy theories - laid out in film and photographs. Outside, Dealey Plaza is startlingly small: the grassy knoll is a low bank, the triple underpass is right there, and two painted marks on Elm Street show where the shots struck. Philip Johnson's stark white cenotaph for Kennedy stands a block east, and the 1892 Old Red Courthouse next door covers the county's wider history.

2. 02

   Dallas Arts District - nineteen blocks and four Pritzker winners

   culture arts history ⭐ Highly recommended

   The largest contiguous urban arts district in the country runs along Flora Street north of downtown. The Dallas Museum of Art anchors it with a permanent collection you can walk straight into, the Nasher Sculpture Center puts a Renzo Piano pavilion in front of a sculpture garden of Rodin, Calder and Giacometti, the Crow Museum of Asian Art sits opposite, and the performance halls come from I. M. Pei, Norman Foster and the office of Rem Koolhaas. The whole thing is a day on foot.

3. 03

   Deep Ellum - murals, live music and the old Elm Street

   nightlife music culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   Directly east of downtown under the freeway, this was one of the South's significant Black and Jewish commercial districts in the early twentieth century, where Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly played the street corners. It went derelict and came back as the city's music quarter: several hundred murals covering whole blocks, venues running from small rooms to a converted factory, tattoo parlours, and enough bars that weekend nights get loud. Go in the evening, and go on foot.

4. 04

   Klyde Warren Park - the park built on a lid over the freeway

   food culture arts

   Five acres of lawn, trees and food trucks decked over the sunken Woodall Rodgers Freeway, stitching downtown and the Arts District back onto Uptown. There are reading rooms, a children's park, lawn games to borrow and a rolling programme of yoga classes and concerts, and it is the one spot in central Dallas where a crowd reliably gathers outdoors on purpose.

5. 05

   Brisket and Tex-Mex - the two Dallas plates

   food

   The barbecue is Central Texas style at city scale: Pecan Lodge in Deep Ellum is the queue everyone joins, Terry Black's is a few blocks along, and the thing to plan around is that the good places open in the morning and shut when the meat runs out. Tex-Mex is the other half of the argument - El Fenix has been serving the combination plate since 1918, and the frozen margarita machine was invented here in 1971 by a restaurateur who rewired a soft-serve machine.

6. 06

   Perot Museum of Nature and Science - the cube with the escalator on the outside

   culture arts nature wildlife 👍 Popular

   Thom Mayne's stacked concrete block north of downtown, with its main escalator run up the facade inside a glass tube. Inside is a proper science museum: a dinosaur hall built around Texas fossils, an earthquake shake room, a sports hall where you race a projected sprinter, and a gems and minerals gallery. The best hot-afternoon or wet-afternoon option in the city if you have children with you.

7. 07

   Reunion Tower - the ball on the skyline

   scenic 👍 Popular

   A late-1970s observation sphere on three concrete legs at the southwest corner of downtown, studded with lamps that make it the one piece of the skyline everyone recognises at night. The deck is glassed in with an open-air ring, and on a clear day the view runs from Dealey Plaza directly below to the Fort Worth skyline on the horizon. There is a revolving restaurant above it.

8. 08

   Fair Park - Art Deco built for a world's fair

   history culture arts

   Built for the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition and still the largest collection of Art Deco exposition architecture anywhere: a long Esplanade with a reflecting basin, murals and heroic statuary, the limestone Hall of State at the head of it, and the Cotton Bowl stadium behind. For about a month each autumn the State Fair of Texas takes over the whole park, presided over by a fifty-odd-foot talking cowboy called Big Tex and a midway of deep-fried everything.

9. 09

   Dallas Arboretum - gardens on the shore of White Rock Lake

   nature wildlife scenic

   Sixty-odd acres on the eastern shore of the lake, with the water and the downtown skyline as the backdrop. Spring is the big display, when several hundred thousand tulips and the azalea beds come out together; autumn brings a pumpkin village that the whole city photographs. The rest of the year it is simply the most pleasant green space in Dallas.

10. 10

    NorthPark Center - Warhol and Lichtenstein in a shopping mall

    shopping culture arts

    Raymond Nasher built this in 1965 and hung his own collection through the concourses, so you pass Warhol, Lichtenstein and a Mark di Suvero on the way to the shops. Highland Park Village, a few minutes south, is a 1931 Spanish-Mediterranean courtyard usually credited as the first planned shopping centre in America and now full of luxury names. Dallas has treated retail as civic architecture since Neiman Marcus was founded here in 1907.

11. 11

    George W. Bush Presidential Center - the Oval Office at SMU

    history

    On the Southern Methodist University campus in University Park, a presidential library with a full-size reproduction of the Oval Office as it was in the 2000s, a twisted steel beam recovered from the World Trade Center, and a theatre that puts you in the chair for the decisions of the period. It tells the wars and the financial crisis from the administration's own point of view, which is worth knowing before you walk in.

12. 12

    Dallas World Aquarium - a rainforest in a downtown warehouse

    nature wildlife

    In the West End warehouse blocks, and less an aquarium than a vertical rainforest: you go up in a lift and walk back down through a canopy of free-flying toucans and sloths, past a manatee tank, into the Mundo Maya tunnels and the shark exhibit at the bottom. Compact, crowded at weekends, and reliably a hit with small children.

13. 13

    Bishop Arts District - Oak Cliff shops and the Texas Theatre

    food history

    A few low-rise blocks of independent restaurants, bakeries, bars and shops in the old streetcar suburb across the Trinity, reached on the streetcar from Union Station. A short way west along Jefferson Boulevard the 1931 Texas Theatre still runs films, which is worth the detour on its own: it is where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested about eighty minutes after the assassination.

14. 14

    Katy Trail and White Rock Lake - where the city runs

    scenic nature wildlife

    The Katy Trail is a converted rail bed running from the edge of Uptown north to Mockingbird Lane, shaded most of the way and busy from dawn. Farther east, a loop of roughly nine miles circles White Rock Lake, with herons and cormorants on the water, the Arboretum on the far shore and the skyline in view across it - the only stretch of Dallas where the city genuinely disappears.

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