What route did Lee Harvey Oswald take from the Texas Theatre to the Texas School Book Depository (Dealey Plaza)?
Executive summary
The sources provided do not document a clear, contemporaneous route taken by Lee Harvey Oswald from the Texas Theatre to the Texas School Book Depository; in fact the documented chronology runs in the opposite direction—Oswald was employed at the Texas School Book Depository and was later captured in the Texas Theatre after leaving the depository and moving through Dallas and Oak Cliff [1] [2]. Contemporary reporting and major reference works establish his workplace, his arrest location, and that he traced a path through Dallas before capture, but they do not record a step‑by‑step street route from the theatre back to the depository [3] [4] [5].
1. The basic chronology: depository to theatre, not theatre to depository
Every major summary of the assassination notes that Lee Harvey Oswald was an employee of the Texas School Book Depository and that he was apprehended at the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff roughly an hour and a half after the shooting, meaning the movement most reliably recorded is from the depository outward to the theatre rather than the reverse [1] [4] [2].
2. What the sources do say about Oswald’s locations that day
Biographical and museum accounts establish that Oswald worked on the sixth floor of the depository and that he was arrested in the Texas Theatre’s auditorium after officers recognized him there; the Sixth Floor Museum and encyclopedia entries reiterate the depository’s central role and the theatre’s role as his capture site [5] [3] [1].
3. Gaps in the documentary record on an exact street‑by‑street route
The provided materials chronicle Oswald’s places of origin, employment, and arrest, and they sketch a broad narrative that he “traced a path through Dallas” before being caught in Oak Cliff, but none of these sources supplies a contemporaneous, authoritative map or police log listing the exact streets he used between the Texas Theatre and the Book Depository [3] [4] [6]. Where the record is silent, it would be improper to invent a route.
4. What investigators and later historians reconstructed instead
Investigative summaries and timelines focus on key waypoints—TSBD employment, residence on Beckley Avenue, the Tippit shooting, transit into Oak Cliff, and arrest at the Texas Theatre—because those points matter to motive, opportunity and custody; these accounts do not assert a reverse movement from theatre to depository and therefore do not provide a mapped route for that trip [7] [6] [8].
5. Why the question may be framed backwards and how that matters
Asking “What route did Oswald take from the Texas Theatre to the Texas School Book Depository (Dealey Plaza)?” reverses the documented sequence: the historical record shows Oswald at the depository prior to the assassination events and later at the theatre when arrested, so the relevant reconstructive work ordinarily maps his flight away from the depository, not a movement toward it [1] [4]. Any attempt to assert a theatre→depository route would require sources not supplied here.
6. Where to look next for a street‑level reconstruction
For a street‑by‑street reconstruction that the present set of sources does not provide, primary materials such as original Dallas Police logs, arrest reports, witness statements, city bus and taxi records, and detailed HSCA/Warren Commission exhibits would be the relevant documents—none of which are included in the supplied snippets; therefore a definitive theatre‑to‑depository route cannot be established from these sources alone [6] [1].