Facts
📍 Region: Panhandle / City: Amarillo
🗓️ Year Built: 1932
🧑🎨 Architect: W.C. Townes
🏛️ Architectural Style: Art Deco
💎 Unique Details: The courthouse is adorned with bas-relief sculptures that depict regional themes, including longhorn cattle, pioneers, Native Americans, and local flora like cactus pads.
Why See It?
The courthouse stands as one of Texas’s finest examples of Art Deco architecture. Its design features a stepped, ziggurat-like form, characteristic of the style, and is clad in cream-colored terra cotta.
Nearby Highlights
Cadillac Ranch – Perhaps Amarillo’s most iconic attraction: 10 vintage Cadillacs buried nose-down in a field, open for you to spray paint. A must-stop for Instagram photos and Texas kitsch.
The Big Texan Steak Ranch – Famous for its 72-oz. steak challenge and over-the-top Western decor—it’s part restaurant, part tourist experience.
Palo Duro Canyon State Park – This spectacular red-rock canyon is known as the “Grand Canyon of Texas.”
U.S. Route 66-Sixth Street Historic District in Amarillo – Amarillo’s most intact collection of commercial buildings that possess significant associations with the highway. Featuring elements of Spanish Revival, Art Deco, and Art Moderne design, these buildings represent the historic development phases of this early 20th century suburb and the evolving tastes and sensibilities of American culture. [Source: NPS site]
Photo Gallery
