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Downtown Dallas is a busy commercial hub. Many of its skyscrapers are landmarks in their own right with miles of neon lighting up the night sky. The original Neiman Marcus department store, set up in 1907, is still there on Main Street. South of the square on Ervay Street looms the precarious upside-down pyramid of City Hall , which you may recognise as the police station in Robocop . On the north edge of downtown, the Arts District boasts the huge and wide-ranging Dallas Museum of Art with its impressive range of European works downstairs, including a good range of Mondrians, and an especially impressive pre-Columbian collection in the Gallery of the Americas upstairs. Two blocks east, at 2301 Flora St, the magnificent Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center , designed by I.M. Pei, is the home of the symphony orchestra. Tourists flock to the restored redbrick warehouses of the West End Historic District , the site of the original 1841 settlement on Lamar and Munger streets, for the eighty stores and twenty restaurants here. The indoor marketplace has become something of an amusement arcade, with a Planet Hollywood , tacky giftshops, crazy golf, and fast-food outlets. A couple of blocks south and west of here lies Dealey Plaza , forever associated with the Kennedy assassination. The Sixth Floor Museum offerers a re-creation of that fateful event complete with narrative. One block west of Dealey Plaza, in the Dallas Historical Plaza on Main and Market streets, an open cenotaph, designed by Philip Johnson and enclosing an 8ft flat granite block, stands as the John F. Kennedy Memorial.A little further south and east is the city's main business and administrative district, focused around City Hall on Marilla Street. Pioneer Plaza , at Young and Griffin streets, holds the world's largest bronze sculpture, showing forty longhorn steers under the guidance of three cowboys. You can see all of these and much more from the 51st-story observation deck in the Reunion Tower , on the east side of downtown next to the Amtrak station. |