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Contrary to popular belief, there's no oil in glitzy, status-conscious DALLAS . Since its foundation as a prairie trading post, by Tennessee lawyer John Neely Bryan and his Arkansan friend Joe Dallas in 1841, successive generations of entrepreneurs have amassed wealth here through trade and finance, using first cattle and later oil reserves as collateral. One early group of European settlers of the 1850s - a group of French intellectuals and artists known as the La Reunion co-operative - had to pack up and move on after a series of summer droughts and a harsh winter; the few who stayed would include a future mayor of Dallas. The city still prides itself on their legacy of arts and high culture.

The power of money in Dallas was demonstrated in the late 1950s, when its financiers threw their weight behind integration. Potentially racist restaurant owners and bus drivers were pressured not to resist the new policies, and Dallas was spared major upheavals. The city's image was, however, catastrophically tarnished by the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, and it took the building of the giant Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in the 1960s, and the twin successes of the Dallas TV show and the Cowboys football team in the 1970s to restore confidence. Then boom turned to crash once more. Unemployment and the demise of the fictional Ewings, not to mention an appalling crime rate, all took their toll, but the indomitable entrepreneurial spirit remains. After a slump in the late 1980s, the Cowboys are back in the big time, though their off-field antics have provided the nation's papers with some anti-Dallas copy once again.

Competitive with Houston, and smug about its cowtown neighbor Fort Worth, Dallas boasts of its "sophistication" and its "old" wealth. For all that, the stuffiness is tempered by a typically Texan delight in self-parody, and there's still fun to be had if you know where to look - especially in the alternative Deep Ellum district, with its superb restaurants and nightlife.

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.

You can see all of these and much more from the 51st-story observation deck in the Reunion Tower , 300 Reunion Blvd (daily 10am-10.30pm; $2), on the east side of downtown next to the Amtrak station. The Dome Lounge , in the Tower, provides a good place to sip some liquor.

Farther southeast, across I-30, near Harwood Street at 1717 Gano St, Dallas's first park, Old City Park , now serves as both recreational area and museum, charting the history of the city from 1840 to 1910 through more than thirty buildings relocated from towns in north Texas, among them a farmhouse, a bank, a train station, a store, a church and a schoolhouse (Tues-Sat 10am-4pm, Sun noon-4pm; tours Tues-Sat 11.30am and 1.30pm, Sun 12:30pm and 2:30pm; $7; 214/421-5141, ).

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