Skip to main content

It's a Wonderful Bridge

Located along US Route 20 (and New York State Routes 5 and 414), Seneca Falls, New York is known for a fair number of important events throughout its history. This town located within the Finger Lakes region of New York State is the home to the Women's Rights National Historical Park, for one. It is also said that Seneca Falls is the inspiration for the fictional town of Bedford Falls in the Christmas holiday film classic, It's a Wonderful Life.

As Frank Capra was developing his screenplay for the movie, he visited Seneca Falls as he had relatives living nearby. There are a number of similarities between Bedford Falls and Seneca Falls, such as the buildings in the towns, the location of Bedford Falls in Upstate New York and the bridge where in the film, George Bailey jumped into the water to save Clarence. In real history, there was a man by the name of Antonio Varacalli, who drowned while rescuing a young woman who had jumped off that bridge. The story of that event was adapted for the film.

In modern times, Seneca Falls does its part in honoring the legacy of It's a Wonderful Life. There is a museum called The Seneca Falls It's a Wonderful Life Museum dedicated to the film located in Seneca Falls. As for that bridge where important scenes from the movie were set, Seneca Falls has a few items of note related to the movie located on the bridge itself. While the bridge scenes were filmed at a Hollywood studio, you can find the inspiration of the bridge crossing the Seneca River (also part of the Cayuga-Seneca Canal) right in downtown Seneca Falls.

Bridge Street Bridge photos:





I have some more Seneca Falls pictures located on my Flickr account as well for you to check out.

Sources and Links:
The Seneca Falls It's a Wonderful Life Museum - https://www.wonderfullifemuseum.com

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

  Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

Old River Lock & Control Structure (Lettsworth, LA)

  The Old River Control Structure (ORCS) and its connecting satellite facilities combine to form one of the most impressive flood control complexes in North America. Located along the west bank of the Mississippi River near the confluence with the Red River and Atchafalaya River nearby, this structure system was fundamentally made possible by the Flood Control Act of 1928 that was passed by the United States Congress in the aftermath of the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 however a second, less obvious motivation influenced the construction here. The Mississippi River’s channel has gradually elongated and meandered in the area over the centuries, creating new oxbows and sandbars that made navigation of the river challenging and time-consuming through the steamboat era of the 1800s. This treacherous area of the river known as “Turnbull’s Bend” was where the mouth of the Red River was located that the upriver end of the bend and the Atchafalaya River, then effectively an outflow

California State Route 203 the proposed Minaret Summit Highway

California State Route 203 is an approximately nine-mile State Highway located near Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Mono County.  California State Route 203 as presently configured begins at US Route 395, passes through Mammoth Lakes and terminates at the Madera County line at Minaret Summit.  What is now California State Route 203 was added to the State Highway System in 1933 as Legislative Route Number 112.  The original Mammoth Lakes State Highway ended at Lake Mary near the site of Old Mammoth and was renumbered to California State Route 203 in 1964.  The modern alignment of the highway to Minaret Summit was adopted during 1967.   The corridor of Minaret Summit and Mammoth Pass have been subject to numerous proposed Trans-Sierra Highways.  The first corridor was proposed over Mammoth Pass following a Southern Pacific Railroad survey in 1901.  In 1931 a corridor between the Minarets Wilderness and High Sierra Peaks Wilderness was reserved by the Forest Service for po