President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, two hundred yards from this location, an event that changed the city and the world forever. Dedicated on June 24, 1970, the John F. Kennedy Memorial was created as both a tribute to Kennedy's life and a reflection of the profound impact of his death on the nation and the world. Within months of the assassination, hundreds of suggestions for a memorial reached Dallas, and American architect and Kennedy-family friend Philip Johnson was chosen to design it for the city. His concrete monument took the form of a cenotaph, or open tomb, intended to symbolize the freedom of Kennedy's spirit, which he envisioned as something humble and spartan for one whose remains lie elsewhere. The memorial is a roofless room thirty feet tall and fifty feet square, composed of seventy-two white precast concrete columns, with walls supported by eight pillars, two at each corner, that appear to float above the ground. Narrow openings on the north and south sides lead into a quiet enclosure centered on a simple black granite slab bearing the president's name in gold letters. Designed by Philip Johnson and erected by the people of Dallas with support, money, and effort from thousands of citizens, it stands not as a memorial to pain and sorrow, but as a permanent tribute to the joy and excitement of John Fitzgerald Kennedy's life.