thumb|Texas historical marker for the Texas School Book Depository. The word "allegedly" has been highlighted by vandals.

The Texas School Book Depository, later known as the Dallas County Administration Building and now "The Sixth Floor Museum", is a seven-floor building facing Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald was working as an employee at the building when he assassinated United States President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Official government investigations concluded that Oswald shot Kennedy from a sixth floor window on the building's southeastern corner. The building, located at 411 Elm Street on the northwest corner of Elm and North Houston Streets in downtown Dallas, is a Texas Historic Landmark.

Early history

The site was originally owned by John Neely Bryan. In the 1880s, Maxime Guillot operated a wagon shop on the property. In 1894, the Rock Island Plow Company bought the land, and four years later constructed a five-story building for its Texas division, the Southern Rock Island Plow Company.

Under Byrd's ownership, the building remained empty until 1940, when it was leased by grocery wholesaler John Sexton & Co. Sexton Foods used this location as the branch office for sales, manufacturing, and distribution for the south and southwest United States. In November 1961, Sexton Foods moved to a modern distribution facility located at 650 Regal Row Dallas. By then, the building was known locally as the Sexton Building. The building was refurbished, and partitions, carpeting, air conditioning, and a new passenger elevator were added on the first four floors. The company found that the upper floors had sustained oil damage from items stored there by the previous tenant, so they began to cover the floors with plywood to protect their books, stored in cardboard boxes, from the oil. The building's superintendent was Roy S. Truly (1907–1985), who detested Kennedy's pro-civil right stances, as historian William Manchester recounted in his semi-authorized account of the assassination, The Death of a President: November 20–25 (1967).

Work had begun on the west side of the sixth floor just before President Kennedy's motorcade, "leaving the whole scene in disarray, with stock shifted as far as the east wall, and stacks in between piled unusually high." This second building was eventually destroyed to make way for the Woodall Rodgers Freeway.

Later years

The mayor of Dallas, Wes Wise, saved the Texas School Book Depository from imminent destruction, preserving it for further research into the assassination.

The Texas School Book Depository Company moved out in 1970. The building was sold at auction to Aubrey Mayhew, a Nashville, Tennessee music producer and collector of Kennedy memorabilia, by the owner D. H. Byrd. In 1972, ownership reverted to Byrd. In 1977, the building was purchased by the government of Dallas County. After renovating the lower five floors of the building for use as county government offices, the Dallas County Administration Building was dedicated in March 1981. The 1991 film JFK was shot at the building, production paid $50,000 to put someone in the window from which Oswald was supposed to have shot Kennedy. They were allowed to film in that location only between certain hours with only five people on the floor at one time: the camera crew, an actor and Stone. Co-producer Clayton Townsend has said that the hardest part was getting the permission to restore the building to the way it looked back in 1963. It took five months of negotiation.

On President's Day 1989, the sixth floor opened to the public, for an admission charge, as the Sixth Floor Museum of assassination-related exhibits. On President's Day 2002, the seventh-floor gallery opened. The gallery opened in February 2002 with the exhibit: "The Pulitzer Prize Photographs: Capture the Moment". A $2.5 million renovation turned the storage area on the seventh floor into a new gallery space for the museum. Other exhibits that have hung in the space include works of Andy Warhol.

In May 2010, burglars attempted to steal a safe from the Sixth Floor Museum, but fled when "they were confronted by a security guard," leaving the unopened safe suspended from a winch on the back of a truck.

A marker on the front of the building reads, "On November 22, 1963, the building gained national notoriety when Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot and killed president John F. Kennedy from a sixth floor window as the presidential motorcade passed the site." Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists have vandalized the marker, carving a gash around the word "allegedly" to highlight it. The Sixth Floor Museum neither encourages nor discourages the idea of conspiracy theories.

See also

  • List of National Historic Landmarks in Texas
  • National Register of Historic Places listings in Dallas County, Texas
  • Recorded Texas Historic Landmarks in Dallas County
  • List of Dallas Landmarks
  • Assassination of John F. Kennedy in popular culture

Notes

References

  • live webcam, EarthCam, from the southeast corner window of the sixth floor in the former Texas School Book Depository
  • Official property ownership record from the Dallas Central Appraisal District