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The Real Bedford Falls, NY
The town from Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life" that is. Bedford Falls was everytown, but it had to have become a germ of an idea before it became a movie. Was Seneca Falls the germ that started it all? They think so...
Quote:
Capra never explained whether the make-believe town was inspired by one specific community or by a composite of wholesome small towns in the snowy northern United States. But that hasn’t stopped little Seneca Falls, in upper New York state — already famous as the cradle of the American women’s-rights movement — from asserting a claim as the film’s likely inspiration.
Frank Capra visited there a year before putting the film together. A barber, still living, remembers cutting his hair. And Capra likely came through Seneca Falls often on his frequent journeys to visit his aunt in the nearby larger city of Auburn, New York.
There’s a bridge in Seneca Falls that looks just like the one from which an angel in human form jumps to save the film’s hero, George Bailey. In fact, there’s an old plaque on that bridge — now called the “Bailey Bridge” — that Capra may have seen. It honors a young man who gave his life jumping into the canal below to save a woman who had leapt off the bridge in 1917.
There’s a house in town — check it out on the left — that is the spitting image, as my mother used to say, of the Bailey family home in the film. The train station looks just like Bedford Falls’s depot, too. There are also tombstones in Seneca Falls’s tiny cemetery carrying the names “Bailey” and “Martini” and “Partridge” — names that coincide with three prominent characters in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
They have a very good case for being the "real" Bedford Falls...
The Real Bedford Falls
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