Dallas

The 6th floor of the old book depository, where the shots at Kennedy came from, is a museum, its corner window glassed off with boxes stacked as they were. White X's on Elm Street mark where shots hit, but traffic never stops, so standing on them is risky.

At the heart of the Arts District, its permanent collection is free. Frederic Church's The Icebergs was lost for decades until it turned up in an English country house in 1979 and came here. With the Nasher Sculpture Center across the street, half a day fits.

Built in 2012 on a deck over the freeway that splits downtown, the park has traffic running beneath its lawn. Around noon food trucks line the kerb and office workers pour out. It also links the Arts District and Uptown on foot.

The observation tower, a ball on a column, went up in 1978. Hundreds of lights set in the ball's lattice change colour and pattern every night. The land is so flat that the view from the deck runs unbroken to the horizon on every side.

Forty-nine bronze longhorns and three mounted cowboys come down a slope and across a stream, all life-size. They honour the Shawnee Trail, a 19th-century cattle route near the city. With no fence, by the convention centre, you can walk among them.

In the 1920s blues players gathered in this Black neighbourhood; now it is a strip of bars and venues with murals on every wall. Quiet by day, it fills on Friday and Saturday nights. It lies just across one freeway east of downtown.

An hour west, Fort Worth's old livestock market district survives. Twice a day, at 11:30am and 4pm, cowboys drive a herd of longhorns down the main street. On Friday and Saturday nights the arena on the same street holds a rodeo.

Louis Kahn designed it, with long concrete vaults split at the crest so natural light washes softly through the rooms. The Torment of Saint Anthony, thought painted by Michelangelo at 12 or 13, is his only painting in the Americas. The collection is free.

It stands on the Southern Methodist University campus. In a full-size replica of the Oval Office you can sit behind the desk for a photo. Twisted steel from the World Trade Center, brought down on 9/11, rises at the centre of one gallery.

The botanical garden spreads over a hill above White Rock Lake, and in spring hundreds of thousands of tulips open together. In autumn a village built of tens of thousands of pumpkins draws families with children. The downtown towers show across the lake.

Renzo Piano designed this sculpture museum, opened in 2003; past the glass-roofed galleries lies a garden set with Rodin and Miró. Hidden in the garden's back corner sits a James Turrell skyspace, where you sit on a bench and look up at a square of sky.

Opened in 2012, the museum is a rock-like cube with a glass-tubed escalator slanting up its outside. The route is to ride it to the top floor, then walk down past the dinosaur fossil hall and the earthquake exhibits.

A cluster of low brick shopfronts in Oak Cliff, south of the Trinity River, filled with local bookshops, vintage stores and small restaurants instead of chains. It feels nothing like the downtown towers, and evenings bring a crowd hunting for patio tables.

Home of the Dallas Cowboys, opened in Arlington in 2009, with a roof that slides open. The giant video board hanging over midfield is the spectacle, and on non-event days a tour walks you through the locker room and onto the field.

Philip Johnson designed this concrete fountain park, completed in 1974. In the famous Active Pool, water cascades down stepped walls into a deep pit. Stepping stones lead you almost to the bottom, though entering the water is forbidden.