DALLAS — On Tuesday, a few of the faithful will make a pilgrimage to Dealey Plaza to mark the moment at 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 22, 1963, when the Kennedy motorcade came gliding down Elm Street and shots rang out.

There will be no official ceremony. For most of the past 48 years, the city has let the anniversary slide by quietly, drawing no more attention to it than an aspiring actor would to a brutal facial scar.

That's all about to change.

Dallas officials and the Sixth Floor Museum — in the former Texas School Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald fired upon President John F. Kennedy — have announced plans for a large 50th anniversary event in 2013 and are raising $2.2 million in public and private money to restore Dealey Plaza.

While some conspiracy theorists fear they will be excluded, and traditionalists worry about change, many locals praise the effort, saying it's time they shed their collective guilt as "the city that killed Kennedy."

"Dallas is still scarred and wounded," said Nicola Longford, executive director of the Sixth Floor Museum, which last year drew 330,000 visitors from 133 countries. "For Dallas, this is an opportunity to look back and not ignore it, to move through it and be inspired."

In the past, city officials said they were honoring requests by the Kennedy family not to observe the anniversary in Dallas.

Those organizing the 50th anniversary event — many of whom, like Longford, are not from Dallas or were born after 1963 — say they are not capitalizing on memories of Camelot. They want to show the world how far "Big D," the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country, has come from its days as a conservative outpost of big-haired socialites, oil tycoons and cowboys.

"People arrive and expect to see people walking down the street in cowboy hats," said Phillip Jones, head of the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau. "Instead, they find a city with the sixth-largest gay and lesbian population in the country, where 40 percent of the population is Hispanic and more than 20 percent is African American."

Many residents walking the city's streets last weekend said Dallas should embrace the anniversary. They included suburbanites, painters in the downtown arts district and hipsters in the Deep Ellum neighborhood.

"You can't get away from it — it's one of the things people associate with the city," said Robert Escobar, 38, who lives in suburban Irving and was downtown with his family perusing holiday displays at the flagship Neiman Marcus store.

Escobar said he hopes the attention on the anniversary helps dispel the stigma that haunts Dallas, reinforced over time by the "Dallas" of J.R. Ewing.

"Dallas is really working to find its identity. I feel it grasping sometimes," said Jeff Sprick, 33, of suburban Flower Mound as he shared a beer outside a vintage Dallas bar called Lee Harvey's, which was also hosting the Assassination City Roller Derby after-party.

Pauline Medrano, who represents the Dealey Plaza area on the City Council, has watched the area diversify into what she calls a "blue county" that has an African-American police chief, a Democratic mayor and the state's only female sheriff, who also happens to be a lesbian.

Medrano was standing with her class from Sam Houston Elementary School when Kennedy's motorcade drove by. Her older brother watched the motorcade on Main Street, and his photo hangs in the Sixth Floor Museum.

Medrano recalls the reputation Dallas had after the killing. "Any time that we traveled anywhere and said we were from Dallas, you just saw the 'Hmmm!' " she said.

Lindalyn Adams is among those whose attitudes toward the assassination evolved through the years. Adams, 81, recalls how her physician husband reported seeing a comatose Oswald being wheeled into an elevator at Parkland Hospital after he had been shot by Jack Ruby. Adams long had trouble visiting the book depository, even after she was chosen to lead the Dallas Historical Commission.

"I was down in the area all the time and had never wanted to even look in the direction of that notorious building," she said. "But I noticed how many people were visiting, at all hours."

Adams went on to champion the founding of the Sixth Floor Museum in 1989, in part because of the success of Ford's Theatre in Washington. Four years later, a ceremony was held on Nov. 22 to dedicate Dealey Plaza as a national historic landmark.

Tom Knock, an associate professor of history at Southern Methodist University, called the museum "a kind of penance" that, along with Oliver Stone's 1991 film "JFK," has "convinced a lot people that Dallas was not responsible" for the assassination, or at least, "did a lot to dim that memory."

Work at Dealy Plaza is to start no later than next October, and planners hope to finish the summer before the anniversary. Improvements include fixing up the pergolas, making the grassy knoll accessible to disabled people and adding historical signs.

Willis Winters, assistant director for the Dallas Park and Recreation Department, said the goal is to better serve those who already frequent the plaza.

"I don't want to interpret for anyone the events, whether there was a conspiracy or not," he said. "What I do want to achieve is that Dealey Plaza is in pristine condition so that when millions of people come there, they're going to see a well-restored site — not peeling paint, broken light fixtures and broken up sidewalks."