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u Meet me in Saint Louis" "Every night we passed towns, some of them away back up on black hillsides, nothing but just a shiny bed of lights; not a house you could see. The fifth night we passed Saint Louis, and it was like the whole world lit up. In St. Petersburg they used to say there was twenty or thirty thousand people in Saint Louis, but I never believed it till I see that wonderful spread of lights at two o'clock that still night. There warn't a sound there; everybody was asleep..." The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. In the 130 years since Huck Finn and Jim passed the city in the silence of night as they floated down the Mississippi on their raft, Saint Louis has certainly changed. Throughout the 19th century it was the great industrial and commercial center of the Mississippi Valley, a magnet for capital, for business and for talented people of many skills. It is still the focal point of human activity in the valley, a center of commerce, production and creative thought. With close to 2,400,000 people in the metropolitan area, Greater Saint Louis ranks tenth in the country in population. A century ago Saint Louis was America's third largest city, surpassed only by New York and Philadelphia. Although other newer cities have passed it in size during the past several decades, Saint Louis yields to none in its long and proud heritage of excellence, its service to the nation in the opening of the West, and its promise of continued greatness. A few people who remember still speak with nostalgia of the great Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 as the finest world's fair of the many held in this country. The memory lingers on in the old song: "Meet me in Saint Louis, Louis, Meet me at the fair... " The soaring Gateway Arch, designed by the noted architect Eero Saarinen and 2