Longtime residents recall how Dallas was labeled the city of hate — "Dallas was the only place ever blamed for killing a president," as historian Conover Hunt put it. Dallas residents talked about telephone operators disconnecting their calls and taxi drivers refusing to give them rides.

"People were spat upon, they were thrown out of restaurants all over the country and this went on for decades," said Hunt, original curator for The Sixth Floor Museum.

At the time, Dallas had a reputation as an ultraconservative city that didn't treat liberals kindly. The day before the assassination, handbills were distributed in Dallas with convict-style photographs of Kennedy and the caption: "Wanted for Treason."

The next day, a full-page ad appeared in The Dallas Morning News. The "American Fact-Finding Committee" demanded to know why the president had "ordered the Attorney General to go soft on communism."

So, when Kennedy was killed, the backlash was immediate.

"All of the nation experienced sadness. But I think the sadness that was experienced here in Dallas was of such great magnitude that it's almost hard to describe it," said Adelle Taylor, 72.

Taylor and her husband, Jim, work as tour guides at Southfork Ranch, made famous by the long-running hit television drama "Dallas," which, along with the emergence of the Dallas Cowboys as "America's Team," helped change the Big D's image.

"It's a little ironic that Dallas is known for the shooting of JFK and the shooting of J.R.," said Mark Thompson, sales and marketing director at Southfork Ranch, which draws more than 400,000 visitors a year.

For years after the assassination, many Dallas residents ignored sites connected with Kennedy's killing. Then the city tried to acknowledge the tragedy in 1970 by commissioning artist Philip Johnson to create a cenotaph, or empty tomb, in a park two blocks from Dealey Plaza. An entire city block was renamed John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza.

But the austere 30-foot blocks of white concrete that were meant to be a place for quiet reflection instead confused some visitors.

Eventually, Hunt and others raised $3.8 million in donations and loans to create The Sixth Floor Museum.

A few miles away, though, trash and pigeon droppings litter the front of the closed Texas Theatre, where police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald. The "E" has fallen off the makeshift "TEXAS" marquee that Oliver Stone put up for his 1991 movie, "JFK."

City voters have approved $500,000 of the $3 million needed to restore Dealey Plaza to its 1963 look. A group working to renovate the Texas Theatre has raised $2.4 million of the $3.5 million project cost.

The Oak Cliff Foundation envisions remaking the theater as a movie house and performing arts center with a lobby exhibit recounting the theater's role in history. Executive director Beverly Mendoza acknowledges surprise at the reactions she receives from some longtime residents asked to contribute.

"It just floored me," said Mendoza, who moved to Dallas in 1995, "for people to still be so ashamed of what happened here that they couldn't get beyond it to acknowledge it as a place of history."