Texas School Book Depository Building

The seven-story warehouse at 411 Elm Street, later known around the world as the Texas School Book Depository, was constructed in 1901 atop the 1898 foundation of another building that had burned down. The new structure served as a warehouse and showroom for the Southern Rock Island Plow Company. Over the decades, the non-descript warehouse at the edge of downtown Dallas housed an air conditioning firm and a grocery wholesaler before the Texas School Book Depository company, a privately-owned textbook distributor, moved into the building in 1963. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the Depository quickly became, in the words of a local journalist, “one of the world’s most photographed structures.” In danger of being torn down in the decade following the tragedy, the building was ultimately saved and renovated into the seat of local government. Beginning in the late 1970s, a grassroots network of preservation activists worked for more than a decade on what would become The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. Original components of the building, from doors and windows to ceiling tiles and even the metal plates of the iconic Hertz Rent-a-Car billboard, formed the foundation of the Museum’s artifact collections.