No One Agrees What Town 'It’s a Wonderful Life' is Based On
- - No One Agrees What Town 'It’s a Wonderful Life' is Based On
Amanda MannenDecember 23, 2025 at 6:30 PM
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Bedford Falls, the small New York town where George Bailey lives in It’s a Wonderful Life, is exactly what a certain type of unsavory person thinks of when they talk about “the good old days.” It’s a close-knit community, full of mom-and-pop shops, and suspiciously lacking in racial, sexual, and religious minorities. It’s the kind of town where everybody knows your name and doesn’t hesitate to hand over their life savings to keep you out of jail for your drunk uncle’s screw-ups. Just where is this podunk haven? And what turnip truck do I take there? A lot of people think they know, and none of them agree.
The loudest claimants of the title of “real-life Bedford Falls” is New York’s Seneca Falls, whose representatives insist that director Frank Capra visited the town in 1945 when the movie was in pre-production. The town’s purported inspiration of the movie is a not-insignificant part of its seasonal economy, which includes an It’s a Wonderful Life museum full of memorabilia that opened in 2010 and an It’s a Wonderful Life festival that’s held every winter. It includes movie-inspired meals, performances, and displays, plus filming relics and appearances by the surviving actors, if you’ll forgive our redundancy.
There’s just one problem: There’s absolutely no evidence that Capra ever even drove through Seneca Falls, let alone based his movie on the town. “I asked Frank repeatedly about this, and we’ve been through his papers many times,” film historian Jeanine Basinger has said. “There's no evidence of any sort whatsoever to support this. That doesn't mean it isn't true, but no one is ever going to prove it." Even Seneca Falls residents can only point to the residence of Capra’s aunt, who lived in Auburn, to theorize that he might have passed through on his way to and from New York City. In fact, stills from a deleted scene suggest that it’s geographically impossible for It’s a Wonderful Life to take place in Seneca Falls. A sign in the scene pointing travelers to other nearby towns indicates that Bedford Falls is located in the southeasternmost tip of New York, not smack in the middle like Seneca Falls. In fact, a town called Bedford Hills fits the bill a lot better, but they have no museums.
There’s one piece of the puzzle that everyone forgets, however: It’s a Wonderful Life was based on a short story. It’s not uncommon for adaptations to change such details, but while Capra may not have had any particular town in mind when he created Bedford Falls, author Philip Van Doren Stern did. “Actually, the town I had in mind was Califon, New Jersey,” Stern told a reporter in 1946. That’s right: Like most of its treasure, New York’s most sentimental is actually from Jersey. Stern also confirmed that “the movie takes place in Westchester County” as the sign from the deleted scene suggests, presumably before throwing a peace sign and skateboarding off into the distance to cause more chaos with his devastating truth bombs.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
