The Plaza

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Walk it with me

Put the argument down for ten minutes. We are going to walk it, and I am not going to try to prove anything to you while we do. Start on the corner of Houston and Elm, on the sidewalk outside the brick building, with your back to it. It is warm. The traffic is real, because this is a working street and always has been. Nothing here is roped off. You are standing on it.¹

Everybody looks up first and you will too. The corner window on the sixth floor is directly above you and slightly to your right, and the first thing that hits people is that it is not high. It is six floors of a nineteen-tens warehouse, not a tower. You could shout to somebody in it. From where you are standing you are closer to that window than you will be at any point in the next two minutes, and the car came right through here.^{2, 3}

Turn left and start down Elm, and the first thing your legs tell you is that you are going downhill. Not steeply. Enough that you lengthen your stride without deciding to. This road drops about twenty-four feet between here and the bridge at the end, and almost nobody who has only seen photographs knows that, because a camera flattens a slope into nothing. Your body knows it in about six paces.^{4, 5}

About thirty paces down there is a live oak on your right, between the road and the building. Stand under it and look back up at that window and you will find you cannot see it properly through the leaves. It was smaller in 1963 and it is the single most argued-about piece of vegetation in American history, and standing under it you understand immediately why. It is not a detail. It is a thing in the way.^{6, 7}

Twenty more paces and the grass opens up on your right, rising to a low wooden fence at the top. That is the knoll and it is about the size of a large garden. To your left is a strip of lawn, a concrete plinth, and then the other side of the road. The whole open space you are standing in the middle of takes about two minutes to cross on foot. That is the entire theater. Everything anybody has ever argued about happened inside a space you could walk across before a kettle boiled.⁸

There are two white crosses painted on the tarmac, and they are not official, and the city has painted over them and somebody has always put them back. Stand on the second one. Cars will come past you while you do it and you will have to step off, and that is the thing nobody tells you: you have to get out of the way of a Honda to stand where a president died. Then look back up the hill at the window.¹

That window is now about two hundred and sixty-five feet behind you and about sixty feet up. Close to the length of a football field, at a shallow downward angle, at a car that had slowed to walking pace. And the fence at the top of that grass is about a hundred feet away on your right. Not a hundred yards. A hundred feet. Both of those numbers are on this page because you are standing between them.^{2, 9}

Now walk on toward the bridge and count. It takes about forty seconds at a normal pace to get from the crosses to the shadow of the underpass, and the car did it in a few. Then you are under the bridge and the noise changes and the plaza is behind you, and you turn round, and the whole thing is laid out in one view from down here: the corner, the slope, the tree, the grass, the fence, the two crosses.⁸

I have no access to anything. I have no source and no clearance and nothing anybody told me in confidence. What I have is that I have done that walk more times than I can count, and then I built it to the survey so I could do it at three in the morning from a desk. Everything else in this book is somebody else’s document. This part is just the ground, and the ground has never once changed its story.¹⁰

The concrete block Abraham Zapruder climbed onto is still there. It is part of a decorative pergola built in the 1930s, and it is about four feet high with a flat top. It was not a camera platform. It was ornamental concrete in a public park, and it happened to be the one spot in Dealey Plaza with an unobstructed view of the whole run down Elm. You can stand on it today.^{11, 12}

The most famous fence in the world is a wooden stockade fence about five feet high, separating a public lawn from a railroad parking lot. It was not built to hide anyone. It is there because a parking lot is ugly. Behind it that day: cars, gravel, a signal tower. Everything that has been imagined behind that fence has been imagined behind a five foot fence around a parking lot.^{13, 14}

Elm, Main and Commerce all funnel west into a single railroad bridge, which is why it is called the triple underpass. That funnel is the whole reason the motorcade had to leave Main Street and jog north onto Elm to reach the freeway. The route that took the President under that sixth-floor window exists because of where a railroad line was laid in the nineteenth century.^{15, 16}

There are two white crosses painted on Elm Street marking where the shots struck. They are not official. The city has removed them repeatedly and someone has always repainted them. People stand in live traffic to be photographed on them. Sixty years on, the most visited memorial in Dealey Plaza is an unofficial mark on a road surface that nobody will admit to maintaining.^{17, 18}

The building was nearly demolished. It changed hands, stood empty, and was very close to being pulled down in the 1970s before Dallas County bought it. Today it is county administration offices, and the sixth floor is a museum. People work ordinary jobs on the other floors. There is a lift, and a parking lot, and someone’s lunch in a fridge, in the most notorious building in America.^{19, 20}

If you go to the museum you cannot stand in the sniper’s nest. The corner of the sixth floor is behind glass, the boxes are arranged as they were found from the police photographs, and the window itself is kept closed. The one window in the world people most want to look out of is the one they will not let you open.^{21, 22}

The live oak that blocked the view from the sixth-floor window is still on Elm Street, and it has kept growing for sixty years. It is considerably bigger now than it was that afternoon. Anyone standing at that window today sees far less of the street than the shooter did, which is one reason the recreation has to model the tree as it was in November 1963 rather than as it is.^{23, 24, 25}

Elm Street drops about twenty-four feet from Houston Street to the underpass. That grade matters more than almost anything: it means the car is going downhill and away, it changes the angle from the window with every frame, and it is why the surveyors in 1964 measured elevation as carefully as distance. The plaza is not flat, and nearly every argument about trajectory turns on how much it is not.^{26, 5}

Behind the fence there was a two-story railroad signal box, and a man sat in it all day controlling switches. That tower is the reason we have any account at all of the parking lot behind the knoll during those minutes. It was demolished years ago. The single vantage point that overlooked the one place nobody else could see no longer exists.^{27, 28}

Dealey Plaza was built in the 1930s as a landscaped western gateway to downtown Dallas. Colonnades, reflecting pools, lawns, a monument to a newspaper publisher. It was a civic beautification project. Every element that people now discuss in ballistic terms, the pergolas, the retaining walls, the fence line, was designed by someone thinking about how a city should look to visitors arriving from the west.^{29, 30}

To get from Houston Street onto Elm, the President’s car has to make a hairpin left of about 120 degrees. It slows to roughly eleven miles an hour, directly under the sixth-floor corner window of the Book Depository. For a few seconds it is almost stopped, six floors below the rifle. Nobody fires. Not at the easiest shot of the day.^{31, 32, 33}

How it got there

The grassy knoll is not a natural hill. It is landscaping. When Dealey Plaza was laid out in the 1930s the ground was graded so the three streets could descend toward the railroad underpass while the flanking lawns stayed high. That difference in level is the knoll. The most argued-over piece of ground in American history is the by-product of a drainage and roadway plan.^{34, 5}

There was an earlier building on the Depository’s corner and it did not survive. The structure standing today went up in 1901 after fire destroyed its predecessor, built for a farm machinery company. The Southern Rock Island Plow Company. Seven floors of brick designed to hold plows. It was a warehouse for heavy agricultural equipment before it was anything else.^{35, 36}

The triple underpass was built in the 1930s, before the plaza around it. A railroad line already crossed there and the roads had to get under it, so the bridge was engineered and the streets were dropped to meet it. Everything else in Dealey Plaza, the slope, the lawns, the pergolas, was arranged afterwards around a piece of railroad infrastructure.^{37, 38}

Dealey Plaza was Depression-era public works. Landscaped lawns, colonnades, reflecting pools and a monument, built to give Dallas a proper western gateway and to put people to work. Somebody drew those pergolas as civic ornament. Nobody involved could have imagined that the shape of a decorative concrete colonnade would one day be argued over frame by frame.^{39, 30}

George Bannerman Dealey ran the Dallas Morning News and spent decades pushing the city to improve itself. Flood control on the Trinity, civic planning, this gateway. The plaza carries his name because he campaigned for it. His newspaper is also the one that carried the black-bordered advertisement attacking the President on the morning of the twenty-second.^{40, 30}

The founder’s son was running that newspaper by 1961, and in October of that year he sat at a White House luncheon for Texas publishers, with the President a few feet away, and told him the country thought his administration were weak sisters. Then the line people remember. We need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas think you are riding Caroline’s tricycle. Caroline was three years old.⁴¹

What happened next matters, because it tells you this was not ordinary conservative opinion. Other Texas publishers in that room got to their feet and shouted him down. Several apologized to the President and said he was not speaking for them. One of them accused him to his face of leading the worst fascist movement in the Southwest. This is a newspaperman being disowned in the White House by his own colleagues.⁴²

So hold the shape of it. The founder campaigned for a gateway into his city and the city named it after him. His son ran the family newspaper and told that President to his face that he was a child on a tricycle. That newspaper carried the black bordered advertisement on the morning of the twenty-second. And the President read it, said we are heading into nut country, and four hours later was shot to death in the plaza named for that man’s father. Nobody arranged that. It is just the shape the day had.¹⁰

The building across Houston Street from the Depository is named for what it did. Dal-Tex is short for Dallas Textile, and it was full of clothing and fabric businesses with showrooms and offices. Two brick warehouses facing each other across a corner, both full of ordinary commerce. That is the architecture at the center of sixty years of theory.⁴³

The red sandstone courthouse on the corner went up in 1892 with turrets and a clock tower, decades before the plaza, the underpass or either warehouse. It has outlived the Depository’s original owner, the textile trade, the railroad yard and the plaza’s own purpose. It is the one thing in every photograph of that corner that was already old and is still there.⁴⁴

§The stockade fence was not part of the original civic design. It is a wooden boundary between the landscaped lawn and the railroad’s gravel parking lot, put up because two different owners needed a line between them. Nobody designed it, nobody photographed it before 1963, and its exact age is not well documented. The most famous fence in the world is a property boundary of uncertain date.^{45, 46}

There is a small log cabin near the plaza presented as John Neely Bryan’s, the founder of Dallas. It is a reconstruction, assembled to mark the spot rather than to be the original building. That is worth knowing before you point a camera at it: the birthplace of the city, standing a short walk from where a President was killed, is itself a recreation.^{47, 48}

Strip away what happened and what is this place for? Moving cars. Three streets funneled under a railroad, graded for drainage, dressed with lawns so the approach to downtown looked civilized. Every feature people now discuss in ballistic terms. The slope, the fence line, the pergola, the curbs. Exists because somebody was solving a traffic problem in the 1930s.^{49, 50}

The buildings around it

There are four tall buildings around the corner of Elm and Houston, not one. The County Records Building stands directly across Houston Street from the Depository, and people watched the motorcade from its windows all the way up. Their accounts are in the record and almost nobody quotes them, because the building has no story attached. Being on the wrong corner is the difference between a famous witness and a forgotten one.^{51, 52}

On the side of the Dal-Tex building there is an iron fire escape running down toward Elm Street. It gives an elevated open platform with a clear view of the whole street, and it required no key, no lift and no employee badge. Nobody has ever placed a shooter on it and no evidence points there. It is simply the most accessible high position in Dealey Plaza, and it is worth knowing it exists.^{53, 54}

The red sandstone building with the turrets at Houston and Main is the old Dallas County courthouse, built in 1892. The motorcade drove straight past its front door on the way into the plaza. It was already an antique when Kennedy went by, and it is still standing. One of the few things in every photograph of that day that has not been altered, demolished or rebuilt since.^{44, 3}

West of the plaza, past the underpass, is a railroad station and a working goods yard. That is the reason there is a signal tower, a parking lot full of railroad employees’ cars, and men on the bridge in the middle of a workday. The knoll is not a park at the edge of a city. It is the back fence of a railroad.^{55, 45}

The building had several lives before it stored schoolbooks. It went up in 1901 and spent decades as a warehouse for other companies, holding farm machinery and groceries under different names. The Texas School Book Depository had only occupied it for a few years by 1963. The most famous address in America was a rented warehouse with a short tenancy.^{35, 36}

Behind the stockade fence is not woodland. It is a gravel parking lot belonging to the railroad, full of parked cars, with a signal tower at one end and the goods yard beyond. Anyone standing at that fence had rows of vehicles behind them and a man in a tower looking down. It is the least private place to do anything unobserved in the whole plaza.^{27, 56}

Down Elm Street there were lampposts, with cables strung between them. They matter, because from an upstairs window a lamppost is a moving obstruction that crosses the target as the car goes past. Every serious study of what could be seen from that window has had to account for street furniture, which is not something anybody thinks about until they try it.^{57, 25}

There are two long reflecting pools in Dealey Plaza, one on each side, part of the 1930s design. They are in the background of an enormous number of photographs from that day and almost nobody registers them. If you want to date or place a picture from the plaza, the pools, the colonnades and the lamp standards do more work than anything in the foreground.^{58, 59}

The pedestal is not free-standing. It is the end of a low concrete retaining wall that runs along the top of the knoll, part of the pergola structure. That wall is the reason the ground behind Zapruder is higher than the street in front of him, and it is why his camera looks slightly down onto the car. The most analyzed camera angle in history is the height of a garden wall.^{60, 61}

Elm, Main and Commerce run parallel through this plaza, and the crowds were spread across all three. People on Main Street were a full block away with a lawn and a road between them and the President. They heard everything and saw almost nothing. When you read that a witness was in Dealey Plaza, the first question worth asking is which of the three streets they were standing on.^{62, 63}

Inside the Depository

Out of hundreds of people in this plaza, one man was looking straight at the window. Howard Brennan was a steamfitter. He sat on that low wall across from the Depository, eating lunch, and watched a man in a sixth-floor window with a rifle. The description he gave went out over police radio at 12:45. 15 minutes after the shots.^{64, 65}

One of the first people to tell police about the window was fifteen years old. Amos Euins had skipped part of school to see the President. He was near the corner of Elm and Houston when he looked up and saw a rifle barrel in the Depository. He ran for a police officer and pointed. He testified to the Warren Commission at sixteen.^{66, 67}

Three men watched the motorcade from the floor directly underneath the sniper’s nest. Harold Norman, Bonnie Ray Williams and James Jarman, at the fifth-floor windows. One story down. Norman testified he heard three shots above his head, heard the shell casings hit the floor, and heard the bolt working between them. Williams said dust came down onto his hair.^{68, 69, 70}

†There is a timing problem inside the Depository that has never been settled. Victoria Adams watched from a fourth-floor window with Sandra Styles. She testified that within about a minute of the shots they ran down the back stairs, and that they met nobody. If she is right, the stairwell was empty when the gunman should have been on it. She never backed down.^{71, 72}

A Dallas motorcycle officer was inside the Depository within about ninety seconds of the last shot. Marrion Baker ran straight for the Depository, and the superintendent, Roy Truly, took him to the stairs. On the second-floor landing Baker saw a man through a lunchroom door and drew his gun on him. Truly said the man worked there. It was Lee Harvey Oswald.^{73, 74, 75}

That morning he got a ride to work from a nineteen-year-old co-worker. Buell Wesley Frazier drove Lee Harvey Oswald in from Irving. Oswald was carrying a long paper package, and he told Frazier it was curtain rods for his room. Frazier remembered him carrying it cupped in his hand with the end under his armpit. He put it on the back seat. No curtain rods were ever found in the room Oswald was renting.^{76, 77}

The building was a book warehouse. Publishers stored textbooks there and Texas schools ordered from it, and about seventy-five people spent their days filling those orders and moving cartons on trolleys. The sixth floor was storage and a plywood floor was being laid across part of it that week. It was the least remarkable building on the corner until twelve thirty.^{78, 79}

Men had been working on the sixth floor all morning. A crew was laying new plywood flooring, moving stacks of cartons out of the way as they went. At about midday they knocked off and rode the lifts down for lunch, racing each other in the two freight elevators. They left the sixth floor empty, with the boxes they had shifted still stacked where they had put them.^{80, 81}

A group of Depository employees stood on the front steps to watch the motorcade go by. They are visible in photographs taken during the shooting, standing in the entrance of the building the shots were fired from, looking out at the street. Some of them did not learn where the shots had come from until they were told hours later, standing in the same doorway.^{82, 83}

The building had no passenger lift for the upper floors. It had two open freight elevators worked by ropes, and a wooden staircase at the back. That is the whole vertical circulation of a seven-story building. Every timing argument about who could get from the sixth floor to the second in ninety seconds turns on a rope-operated freight lift and a set of stairs.^{84, 85}

One employee was working on the fifth floor and told the Warren Commission he heard one noise and thought it was a backfire. He did not go to a window. He did not run. He carried on with what he was doing. In a building where three men one floor up heard shells hit the floor above them, another man in the same building barely registered it. That is how unreliable sound was in there.⁸⁶

The job title of the man at the center of this case was order filler. He walked floors with a clipboard, pulled schoolbooks off stacks, and made up cartons for shipping. He had started five weeks earlier. It is a job that gives someone a reason to be on any floor of that building at any time of day, and nobody would look twice.⁸⁷

The reason a corner of the sixth floor could be rearranged without anyone noticing is that almost nobody went up there. It was long-term storage. The crew laying the floor were the only regular traffic that week, and they were working at the far end. Somebody could stack cartons into a low wall by a window and be confident of being alone for an hour.⁸⁸

When a policeman came through the second-floor lunchroom door about ninety seconds after the shots, the man he found was holding a soft drink. That detail has been argued over for sixty years. Whether he had time to buy it, whether he was calm or out of breath, whether the officer’s memory shifted later. A bottle of Coke is load-bearing evidence in the assassination of a President.^{73, 75, 89}

The Depository kept operating. Schoolbooks still had to reach schools, so within days people were back at work in a building crawling with federal agents, filling orders on floors below a sealed crime scene. The company moved out a few years later. For a while, the most notorious address in America was still shipping textbooks on schedule.^{90, 91}

The reason a policeman lowered his gun in that lunchroom is that a manager said four words: he works up here. Roy Truly had hired the man five weeks earlier on a phone call from a neighbor of his mother’s. In the space of a minute and a half, an ordinary act of workplace vouching became one of the most consequential sentences anybody spoke that day.^{74, 73, 75}

† disputed ‡ theory § reconstructed — everything unmarked is established. Superscript numbers key to the sources below. Corrections

Sources for this chapter

91 sources. Every claim above is keyed to one of them. The complete list for the whole book runs to 1,276.

the author's visits to Dealey Plaza
Commission Exhibit 884
the reconstruction's building geometry
Commission Exhibit 884 elevation column
the reconstruction's elevation model
the reconstruction's modeled live oak
Warren Report, chapter III, on the foliage
the reconstruction's plaza geometry
the reconstruction's sightline tests
the author's assessment
Dealey Plaza pergola construction records (1930s WPA-era)
the reconstruction's pergola geometry
Dealey Plaza site plans
the reconstruction's stockade fence geometry
Dealey Plaza and triple underpass construction history
Warren Report ch.2 (route rationale)
City of Dallas statements on the Elm Street markings
contemporary reporting on their removal and reappearance
Dallas County records on the acquisition of the TSBD
Sixth Floor Museum institutional history
Sixth Floor Museum exhibit description
DPD crime scene photographs used for the reconstruction
Warren Report ch.3 (foliage obstruction)
1963 photographs of the Elm Street oak
the reconstruction's plaza detail geometry
CE 884 survey (elevations)
Bowers WC testimony (6H284)
Union Terminal Company records on the tower
Dealey Plaza design and construction history (1930s)
Dallas Historical Society
WR ch.2 (motorcade route and speed)
plaza survey geometry (Houston–Elm turn angle)
the reconstruction's motorcade model
Dealey Plaza construction records, 1930s
Dallas County property records for 411 Elm Street
Sixth Floor Museum building history
Triple underpass construction records, 1930s
Dealey Plaza development history
Dealey Plaza construction, 1930s public works programmes
George Bannerman Dealey and the Dallas Morning News
contemporaneous reporting of the White House luncheon for Texas publishers, 27 October 1961
contemporaneous reporting of the 27 October 1961 luncheon
Dal-Tex Building history, Dallas County records
Old Red Courthouse (1892), Dallas County records
Dealey Plaza and rail yard site plans
1963 photographs; earlier documentation is sparse
John Neely Bryan cabin, Dallas Historical Society
Dallas County records
Dealey Plaza design and construction history
triple underpass roadway engineering
Warren Commission testimony of County Records Building witnesses
Dealey Plaza site plan
Dal-Tex building elevation and fire escape, 1963 photographs
absence of related evidence in WC and HSCA records
Union Terminal Company records
1963 photographs of the rail-yard parking lot
1963 photographs of Elm Street
Dealey Plaza 1930s design drawings
the reconstruction's geometry for the reflecting pools
Dealey Plaza pergola and retaining wall drawings
the reconstruction's elevation model and building geometry
Dealey Plaza street layout
Warren Commission witness locations
Brennan WC testimony (3H140)
DPD radio log, 12:45 broadcast
Euins WC testimony (2H204)
DPD statements, 22 Nov 1963
Norman WC testimony (3H186)
Williams WC testimony (3H161)
Jarman WC testimony (3H198)
Adams WC testimony (6H386)
Warren Report ch.4 (timing reconstruction)
Baker WC testimony (3H242)
Truly WC testimony (3H212)
Warren Report ch.4
Frazier WC testimony (2H210)
Warren Report ch.4 (the paper bag, CE 142)
Warren Report ch.4 (the Texas School Book Depository operation)
employee testimony
Warren Report ch.3 and ch.4
floor-laying crew testimony (Williams, Arce, Piper and others)
Altgens photograph
Warren Commission testimony of TSBD employees on the front steps
Warren Report ch.4 (Depository elevators and stairway)
Baker and Truly WC testimony
Warren Commission testimony of TSBD employees on upper floors
Warren Report ch.4 (Oswald's employment at the TSBD from 16 October 1963)
Warren Report ch.3 (sixth floor usage and the flooring work)
Baker's earlier written statement
Texas School Book Depository company records
contemporary press coverage