In the early 1770s, the so-called Upper Ponds were dug in the landscape section of the Catherine Park, supplied with water through the Taitsky aqueduct. Being at a level above the Large Pond, they were connected to it by a channel, which created the risk of the hollow being washed out by water freely flowing down the hillside; the created ponds could also thus become shallower and dry up. The need arose to create a system of dams on this channel to ensure a smoother flow between the ponds.

Engineer Gerard prepared and implemented several projects of cascade dams that allowed maintaining the water level in the Upper Ponds (this was done by him simultaneously with the arrangement of cascades on the Lower Ponds in the Old Garden — that is, in the formal part of Catherine Park). All of them were made as decorative park structures.

In the 1770s or already in the 1780s, Gerard and the court architect Neelov created the lowest of the three dams on the canal section between the Upper and Swan Ponds — the Red Cascade, called the "Red Bridge." Initially, one of the slopes of the Sliding Hill — an amusement structure located on the site of the present Granite Terrace — approached the place where the cascade was arranged, but in 1791–1795 it was completely dismantled.

The Red Cascade is also called the Turkish Cascade, which is due to its appearance (its turrets resemble a fortress structure) and is a reference to the victories won by Russian troops in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774. Possibly, its role in the park landscape was to symbolically represent the Ottoman Empire, for which Gothic motifs were used in the architecture of the cascade, making the structure conditionally resemble Turkish buildings (Gothic, in a broad sense in the 18th century, could be considered the absolute opposite of Classicism, which was based on ancient models, and therefore organically intertwined with exotic architectural traditions, including Turkish ones).

In Tsarskoye Selo in the 1770s–1780s, several objects appeared related to the events of the 1768–1774 war, which even formed a kind of "Turkish complex" of structures, according to art historian Petrov. Besides the Red Cascade, these include monuments such as the Chesme Column (in honor of the victory in the Battle of Chesme), the Kagul Obelisk (commemorating the victory in the Battle of Kagul), the Morea Column (in memory of successful military actions on the Morea Peninsula), the Crimean Column (a monument to the conquest of Crimea during the war, which acquired new meaning after the peninsula's annexation to the Russian Empire), as well as the Tower Ruin (a memorial symbolizing the defeat of the Ottoman Empire) and the Turkish Kiosk (a pavilion on an islet in the middle of the Upper Ponds, above the Red Cascade, whose construction, according to legend, is connected with the diplomatic successes of Prince N. V. Repnin in Turkey; it burned down during the Great Patriotic War).

Over the centuries since the construction of the Red Cascade, the landscape around the dam has changed. Oaks, maples, and shrubs have grown, the waters of the canal are now shaded by tall trees, the stones of the dam have blackened, covered with moss and algae. All this together has made the Red Cascade arguably the most picturesque structure in Catherine Park, according to Petrov (the researcher compared the landscape contemporary to him with 18th-century images, for example, with a watercolor by the landscape artist Ivanov, kept in the collection of the palace museums of the city of Pushkin).

In the 1960s, when A. N. Petrov's monograph was written, the towers of the cascade were deprived of their hemispherical domes; they were subsequently restored. Since 2001, according to a decree of the Government of the Russian Federation, the Red Cascade has been included in the list of objects of historical and cultural heritage of federal significance.

Sources:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Красный_каскад