Texas School Book Depository, Historic book warehouse in West End District, Dallas, United States
Texas School Book Depository is an eight-story brick warehouse in the West End District of Dallas, marked by tall windows and stone details in the Romanesque Revival style. The facade shows heavy rounded arches and solid-looking walls that give the former storage building a weighty, permanent appearance.
The warehouse was built in 1901 as a distribution center for school textbooks and served Texas education for decades. On November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald fired from a window on the sixth floor at President Kennedy, bringing the structure into global focus.
The structure takes its name from the textbook distributor that once stored and shipped school materials for Texas classrooms. Today people from around the world visit the site to understand how a single day altered American history.
The museum on the sixth floor opens daily from 10 AM to 5 PM, with audio guides in seven languages available at the entrance. Visitors should allow time to view the exhibits carefully and understand the perspective from the windows.
The sixth floor remains preserved as investigators found it in 1963, including the corner where shell casings lay. Cardboard boxes still sit in the same positions, showing how Oswald arranged his firing position behind stacked book cartons.
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