Downtown Dallas packs a surprising number of museums and public spaces into a few districts: the Arts District and Victory Park in the north, the business core around Thanks-Giving Square, and the old brick warehouses of the West End by Dealey Plaza. This guide covers nine of them, from a park built over a freeway to the window that made the city's darkest day famous. Eight are in or next to downtown and easy to link on foot; the ninth, the Arboretum, is a short drive away by White Rock Lake.
Klyde Warren Park
Klyde Warren Park opened on 27 October 2012 on a deck built over the sunken Woodall Rodgers Freeway, which had cut the Arts District off from Uptown for decades. It covers about five acres across three blocks between Pearl Street and St. Paul Street, and its name comes from Klyde Warren, the son of the businessman Kelcy Warren, whose donation bought the naming rights. Traffic still runs underneath; on top there are lawns, fountains, a children's park, dog parks and a restaurant pavilion, with food trucks parked along the edge. It is the first stop of our scavenger hunt.
- Stand on the bridges at either end of the park and look down at the freeway lanes disappearing under the grass.
Dallas Museum of Art
The Dallas Museum of Art began in 1903 as the Dallas Art Association, showing pictures in the public library. It moved to an Art Deco building at Fair Park for the Texas Centennial in 1936 and in January 1984 to its present home in the Arts District, a low limestone building by the New York architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. The collection holds more than 24,000 objects spanning some five thousand years. Highlights include The Icebergs by Frederic Edwin Church, a painting from 1861 that was long lost before it was rediscovered and given to the museum in 1979, and the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection, shown in rooms modelled on the Reves' villa in the south of France. The museum is a stop on our scavenger hunt.
- Outside, the sculpture garden and Mark di Suvero's large steel sculpture Ave.
Perot Museum of Nature and Science
The Perot Museum opened on 1 December 2012 in Victory Park, on the edge of the Arts District. It continues the work of three older Dallas museums of natural history, science and health, and it is named after Margot and Ross Perot, whose children gave a large gift in their honour. The architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis designed it as a giant cube floating over a landscaped base, with a roof of native, drought-tolerant plants and rock. Inside, five public floors hold exhibition halls on dinosaurs, precious stones and minerals, Texas wildlife, engineering and space. It is a stop on our scavenger hunt.
- The escalator in a glass tube that sticks out diagonally from the cube, and the Alamosaurus skeleton in the dinosaur hall on Level 4.
The Dallas World Aquarium
Despite the name, the Dallas World Aquarium is as much a rainforest as an aquarium. It opened in October 1992 in a gutted 1924 warehouse in the West End and has grown into neighbouring buildings since. The Orinoco exhibit, opened in 1997, recreates the treetops of a South American rainforest with birds, monkeys and sloths; Mundo Maya, opened in 2004, is devoted to the animals of Mexico and Central America. Underneath, aquariums show sea life from around the world, from sharks to manatees. It is a stop on our scavenger hunt.
- The walk-through shark tunnel, and the tanks with manatees and Amazonian rays.
Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum
This museum grew out of a group formed by Dallas Holocaust survivors in 1977, which opened a memorial centre in North Dallas in 1984. In September 2019 it moved into its own building at the corner of Houston Street and Ross Avenue in the West End, designed by Omniplan, with a band of copper on the outside chosen to blend with the old brick of the district. The Holocaust wing tells the story through the testimony of survivors who settled in Dallas; other wings cover human rights, the stages of genocide and American civil rights history, with the stories of people who chose to stand up for others. It is a stop on our scavenger hunt.
- A Nazi-era railway boxcar of the type used for deportations, and the Dimensions in Testimony theatre, where you can put questions to recorded survivors such as Max Glauben.
The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
On 22 November 1963 shots fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository killed President John F. Kennedy as his motorcade passed below. The red-brick building dates from 1901 and is now the Dallas County Administration Building; since 20 February 1989 its sixth floor has housed a museum about Kennedy's life, his death, the investigations that followed and the way the world remembers him. The exhibition uses films, photographs and objects, and the museum has collected thousands of oral history recordings from witnesses and others.
- The south-east corner window, where the area around the window is in its original condition and the stacked cartons are reproductions, enclosed behind glass.
Thanks-Giving Square
This small triangular square among the office towers was dedicated in November 1976 as one of the city's projects for the US Bicentennial. It was created by the Thanks-Giving Foundation, whose founders included the businessman Peter Stewart, and designed by the architect Philip Johnson as a quiet space of water, grass and walls that shut out the traffic. Its centre is the Chapel of Thanksgiving, a white spiral rising about 90 feet above the street. It is a stop on our scavenger hunt.
- Inside the chapel, look straight up at the Glory Window by Gabriel Loire of Chartres, a spiral of 73 stained-glass panels that is one of the largest horizontal stained-glass pieces in the world; outside, the bell tower and the gilded Ring of Thanks.
AT&T Discovery District
The newest place in this guide is a four-block district around the global headquarters of AT&T in the downtown business core, with a plaza, restaurants, a shop and a great deal of digital screen. It was meant to liven up the downtown streets after office hours, and it hosts events through the year. It is a stop on our scavenger hunt.
- The media wall at Akard and Jackson streets, about 104 feet tall, and the gilded Golden Boy statue in the plaza, a winged figure that once crowned AT&T's old headquarters in New York.
Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden
On the south-eastern shore of White Rock Lake, a short drive from downtown, the Dallas Arboretum covers 66 acres of gardens. It opened in 1984 on two former estates: the DeGolyer House, a Spanish Colonial Revival home from the late 1930s built for the oil geologist Everette DeGolyer, and the neighbouring Alex Camp House. Among the gardens are A Woman's Garden, laid out on terraces, and the Rory Meyers Children's Adventure Garden. In autumn tens of thousands of pumpkins, gourds and squash fill the Pecan Grove, and in spring more than a hundred Japanese cherry trees flower around it. It is not on the scavenger hunt route, so plan it as a separate outing.
How to see them in one walk
Start in Victory Park at the Perot Museum, then walk east to Klyde Warren Park and the Dallas Museum of Art next to it in the Arts District. Head south through downtown to Thanks-Giving Square and the AT&T Discovery District, then west to the West End, where the Sixth Floor Museum, the Holocaust and Human Rights Museum and the Dallas World Aquarium are all within a few blocks of each other. Four of these are big museums that deserve a long visit each, so choose one or two to go inside, and save the Arboretum for another day.
See Dallas with World City Trail
Our Dallas scavenger hunt turns downtown into a game you play on your phone. The route links 10 stops, from Klyde Warren Park to Thanks-Giving Square, and seven places in this guide are among them: Klyde Warren Park, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Perot Museum, the Dallas World Aquarium, the Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, the AT&T Discovery District and Thanks-Giving Square. The route also passes Dealey Plaza, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza and Pioneer Plaza. At each stop you solve a puzzle and hear a short story, at your own pace.
There is also a self-guided walking tour and an outdoor escape game in Dallas, for people who prefer a different format.
Play the Dallas scavenger hunt →
Take the self-guided walking tour of Dallas →
Play the outdoor escape game in Dallas →
Facts checked in October 2026.