The Sixth Floor Museum: Everything Is Smaller Than You Imagined

The museum begins with context — early 1960s, Kennedy's presidency, the Texas political landscape — and does not hurry toward the ending you already know. The effect is not suspense. It is dread. You know what's coming, and the museum lets you sit in the Before for as long as you need.

The sniper's perch at the southeast corner: reconstructed behind glass, boxes arranged as Oswald arranged them, window half-open. The distance from the sixth floor to the motorcade route is shorter than you imagined. The room is small. The window is small. The plaza below is small. Everything about this event is more intimate and more awful than photographs convey.

Seventh floor — often less crowded — has windows looking over Dealey Plaza from a different angle. Stand there long enough and the tourists below begin to look like the crowd in the photographs. Past and present merge. The museum handles conspiracy theories with admirable restraint: presenting evidence, acknowledging questions, declining to resolve them. Open daily. There's no way to prepare. Go.