Imagine sitting at the top of Art Hill just fifty yards in front of the Saint Louis Art Museum. You are sitting just below the crest of Art Hill with the bulk of it stretching below you. At the bottom is what looks like a pond. In 1904 this was the Grand Basin. Below you and to the left of the Grand Basin was the Palace of Machinery and Electricity. On the right side of the Grand Basin was the Palace of Education and Social Economy.

Although inside the Art Museum it can get pretty busy, if you walk or drive to the bottom of Art Hill and stand on the other side of the Grand Basin and look uphill the view is always majestic but it's often almost vacant and sometimes it is. One gets the sense of abandonment and if you let your imagination really roll, perhaps of a nuclear war that had sucked all life from the area yet left the great building at the top intact. 

Where you are standing was occupied by Festival Hall nearly one-hundred years ago.  To your left and to your right were the East  and West Cascades.  Inside the Palace of Machinery was the forty-five thousand kilowatt generator that produced the electricity that ran the fairgrounds.  The three water pumps which brought the Cascades to life boasted a daily capacity of one hundred and sixty-five-million gallons of water.  A mammoth hydraulic press from Germany's Krupp Works was also housed in the building's 406,000 square feet along with dozens of other metal and wood working machines.