Old Red Museum

 

5

39

Anthony H.

Tarzana, CA

A place to go....after all other places on your to do check list has been checked.  It has a second floor museum/kids room/no, that's all.  The museum is pretty much the history of Dallas.  Another place to get a great history of Dallas; the salvation army right outside downtown.  It was just dull, the movie rooms were playing the history channel-ish stuff on repeat.  One thing I learned though was that downtown was a really busy place back in the 60s.  Now it's just as dead as dead itself.  
The best spot of the museum was the bank vault in the 1st floor museum store...and the sales clerk behind the counter gave us the only live "tour" which actually intrigued me.  I've never been in a "working" vault with two feet walls and a vent hole.....that was smaller than my closet.  
The 3 stars are for, 1, not being too big, 1, for having nice employees, and 1, the vault.

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3

3

Anthony H.

Dallas, TX

The "Old Red" courthouse in downtown Dallas has completed its renovation and the second floor now contains a museum on the history of the county.  The museum is huge... you could spend a couple of hours there. The displays are mostly photographs and historic artifacts, and several theatre rooms showing films on various subjects.

My first impression was overkill... too much information. I took a quick tour of the floor and picked out a few things that piqued my interest, then went to Sonny Bryan's for lunch. Went back in, and now that I was not so hungry, I had the patience to focus on some interesting things. The section on Dallas and Bklues music was great... an exhibit on notable inventions coming from Dallas was good... for example, Dallas invented the ATM, the first credit card, and the drive-in food stand. Other displays were more telling, such as a lot of photos of racially segregated Dallas, and the Deep Ellum entertainment district in the 1930s.

All in all, this is one museum I will be returning to, from time to time... I didn't see everything, and I don't think I could have tried.

Incidentally, downtown Dallas on a Wednesday afternoon had a fair number of obvious tourists, and the Visitors Center on the ground floor of the museum was reasonably busy. Kinda surprised me... I'd expected the weekends to have most of the visitor activity. On the other hand, the weather was gorgeous... 70ish, not a cloud in the sky... very moderate for Dallas in the middle of May.

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