Dallas

October 10, 2018









Dallas

With the exception of brief stops at DFW airport, I had never visited Dallas, Texas. It just has never been on the top of my to-do list and it just happens to be one city that I had never felt much time or inclination to visit. Not that there is not plenty of things to see and do there, it just never seemed to happen. Now with my visit to the Texas State Fair, which is held in Dallas each year, I was there with some extra time on my hands. I looked at what there was to do there and determined that there were two spots that I really wanted to see. The first was the Dallas Zoo and the second was Dealey Plaza, the site of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November of 1963.







I hit the zoo first.  The Dallas Zoo is located in Marsalis Park, which is three miles south of downtown Dallas. It is the oldest and largest zoological park in the state of Texas, having been established in 1888. The 106 acre park is home to over 2,000 animals representing 406 species, and while it has been around for ages, features modern state of the art animal enclosures that are as good as any zoo I have been to.





The park is basically divided into two larger areas, ZooNorth and the impressive Wilds of Africa section. The Africa section is especially impressive as it features a long walkway that winds through the wide-ranging exhibit that features African animals grouped together as much as possible in large free range enclosures that offer the animals plenty of room to roam. There is a monorail that circles the area as well, allowing close-up views of the various animals from above.







ZooNorth is the original and oldest section of the zoo. The Wilds of Africa region was constructed seventy-eight years after ZooNorth and is accessed from ZooNorth via a tunnel beneath Clarendon Drive. It includes Giants of the Savanna, which was opened in 2010.





One of the coolest areas of the zoo is the Tiger exhibit. A glass viewing area and pathways allow the visitor to observe Sumatran tigers and Malayan tigers. The tigers' lush exhibits feature sun and shade, shallow pools with deep channels, running streams with hot rocks, perching rocks, and climbing/clawing trees.





The Giants of the Savannahs portion of the zoo features four female African elephants, a large herd of reticulated giraffes African lions, South African cheetahs, impala, Grant's zebras, ostriches, guineafowl, warthogs, and red river hogs. The elephants have a huge space and a welcoming watering hole where they can swim and cool off.





After a nice visit to the zoo, I drove in to downtown Dallas to check out a place that as morbid as it may sound, I have always wanted to visit, Dealey Plaza the site where JFK was killed in November of 1963. Like many Americans, I have read countless books about the assassination and seen movies, documentaries and other coverage of the sad but historic event.







The site has of course become a popular tourist destination and as expected there were crowds of people there who shared my own curiosity. I was surprised by two things initially, one was how little has changed since that fateful day. The plaza and area around it have had very little development or changes since 1963 and the layout is exactly as it was then. Secondly is how small and compact the area was. Perhaps it had seemed larger than life in my historical understanding, but the entire scene is smaller and more compact than I had imagined.







The former Texas Book Depository building, the Grassy Knoll, the Triple Underpass, all looks remarkably similar to images from that time. I was too late on a Sunday afternoon to make it up to the sixth floor perch where Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly fired the fatal shots, but I climbed over the Grassy Knoll, walked over the X on the street that marked the spot where the fatal shots hit the President and got a good overall sense of the place.

The Grassy Knoll





Personally I have always believed that Oswald acted alone and have given little credence to the many, many conspiracy theories. There were a number of people on the site pushing various conspiracies while I was there, but after reading Gerald Posner’s excellent book, “Case Closed”, I feel that it was a lone gunman job- that is unfortunately the American way. After seeing the sightlines from the Sixth floor of the Book Depository Building it seems even more likely to me. Unlike some conspiracy theorists claim, the distance is not that far and most experienced marksmen could have easily made the shot.

Dealey Plaza in 1963









The city of Dallas was smart to build a memorial to Kennedy a couple of blocks away from the actual site, rather choosing to leave the area pretty much as it was then. The memorial is impressive and nice but would have been a strange distraction if it had been built in Dealey Plaza itself.









https://www.dallaszoo.com/