It has become a commonplace to observe that, 60 years ago, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, America lost its innocence – or at least the myth of its innocence. Certainly, the event has left a stubborn impression on history and culture; something to do with the power, grandeur and grubbiness of US politics, with Vietnam, civil rights and the sixties. But I have always sensed that there was something else; something that also formed part of the loss-of-innocence narrative somehow. I have finally realised what it is. It is Dealey Plaza itself.
On the fateful day 60 years ago, everything had been washed doubly clean by the rain that had fallen overnight
On the day of the assassination, those 15 acres, originally completed in 1940, presented a near-perfect tableau of pristine urban space in the modern era. The wide roads through the Plaza arc forward in their pleasing modernist geometries.
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