Dallas is the third-most-populous city in the state of Texas and the ninth-most-populous in the United States.

Downtown Dallas is a hymn to commerce. Many of its skyscrapers are landmarks in themselves; at night the red neon Mobil Pegasus on the 1921 Magnolia Building on Akard and Commerce streets appears to gallop over the city, while over two miles of green argon tubing delineate the 72-story Bank of America building. The original Neiman Marcus department store, set up in 1907 by sister and brother Carrie Neiman and Herbert Marcus and famed for its glamorous Christmas catalog, is still there on Main Street (Mon-Sat 10am-6pm, Thurs until 8pm). One refuge is the Center for World Thanksgiving at Thanksgiving Square at the intersection of Akard, Ervay and Bryan streets and Pacific Avenue (Mon-Fri 9am-5pm, Sat & Sun 1-5pm), with its meditation garden, fountains and modern spiraling chapel - though even here pealing bells boom out at regular intervals. South of the square on Ervay Street looms the precarious upside-down pyramid of City Hall , possibly familiar 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 , 1717 N Harwood St (Tues-Sun 11am-5pm, Thurs until 9pm; free, around $5 for special exhibits; tel 214/922-1200, ), which has plenty 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. The vast geometries of glass, onyx and wood inside cost $80 million, as the tour guides won't let you forget.

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. A small park beside Houston Street's triple underpass, it remains unchanged since the fateful day - in fact, since it was designed by a committee which included LBJ, in the late 1930s - and must be one of the most recognizable urban streetscapes in the world. The Texas Schoolbook Depository itself, at 411 Elm St, is now the Dallas County Administration Building, the penultimate floor of which houses The Sixth Floor Museum (daily 9am-6pm; $9, or $12 with audio tour; tel 214/747-6660 or 1-888/485-4854, ). Displays build up a suspenseful narrative, with the infamous blurred 8mm images of Kennedy crumpling into Jackie's arms left until the end, at which point there's likely to be much sobbing from moved visitors, who can exorcize their grief by writing in the "memory book." The "gunman's nest" has been re-created and, whatever you feel about Oswald's guilt, it is undeniably chilling to look down at the streets below and imagine the mayhem the shooter must have seen that day.

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 . Alongside, at 110 S Market St, the Conspiracy Museum (daily 10am-6pm; $7) is a dreadful waste of money. It strives to impress with its CD-ROM technology, but in fact displays the usual amateurish hand-drawn diagrams and wild accusations, interpreting virtually every public act in America since the late 1950s as the work of the Professional War Machine.

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, a monument to the cattle drives that depicts forty longhorn steers under the guidance of three cowboys.

Dallas is served by two commercial airports: Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (known as DFW International) and Dallas Love Field. In addition, Dallas Executive Airport (formerly Redbird Airport), is a general aviation airport located within the city limits, and Addison Airport is another general aviation airport located just outside the city limits in the suburb of Addison. Two more general aviation airports are located in the outer suburb of McKinney, and on the west side of the Metroplex, two general aviation airports are located in Fort Worth.

DFW International Airport is located in the suburbs north of and equidistant to downtown Fort Worth and downtown Dallas. In terms of size, DFW is the largest airport in the state, the second largest in the United States, and third largest in the world. In terms of traffic, DFW is the busiest in the state, third busiest in the United States, and sixth busiest in the world. Love Field is located within the city limits of Dallas, 6 miles (10 km) northwest of downtown, and is headquarters to Southwest Airlines.

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