Elwood City (Arthur)

Elwood City is a fictional city in the TV show Arthur. The population of the city was revealed in episode 72 as 79,567.

Elwood City was founded in 1903 by Jacob Katzenellenbogan. He had originally intended the town to be called "Elmwood" but someone misspelled it and the corrupted name stuck. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was present at the founding and gave the dedication speech and so were prominent American businessmen Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan, who were partners of Katzenellenbogan. In the episode "On This Spot", it was said that in 1885, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, starring Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull came through Elwood City on the banks of Mill Creek while on tour. In an episode called "Elwood City Turns 100!" in the year 2003 the city celebrated its 100th anniversary.

Elwood City is a large city that has a soda shop, a shopping mall, a movie theater, a science museum, a fire department with fire stations, a police department, a hospital, a city hall, doctors offices, a dump, a planetarium, numerous parks, forests, an animal shelter, a newspaper office, a bike shop, an ice cream shop, a fresh water lake, ponds and streams, a reservoir, a water park, a library, a bowling alley, many churches, a synagogue, a mosque, a pizza restaurant, a community theater, a soccer field, a car dealership (Crosswire Motors), a community garden, a veterinary office/hospital, a professional baseball stadium and team (Elwood City Grebes), a pet store (Al's Pet Shop), a glass shop, a YMCA, diners, a community pool, a recycling center, fast food restaurants (one being the chicken chain Chick'n Lick'n), industries, factories, warehouses, a joke shop (Richard's Joke Shop), a doll hospital, a drug store (Margaret's Drug Store), beauty salons, barber shops, apartment complexes (the Westboro Apartments where Francine and her family are among the tenants), and many other houses and stores. At the center of the town lies a tribute to the dozens of aardvarks that were massacred by rabbits in the "Red Carrot Massacre" of 1934. Arthur and the Read Family live at 562 Main Street.

Much like Springfield from The Simpsons, the exact whereabouts of Arthur’s hometown have never been explicitly stated. Arthur's writers have given conflicting evidence regarding Elwood City's actual whereabouts. While Elwood City bears strong resemblance to the Boston area, home of WGBH—such as Waltham, Massachusetts—there are references to Brown's hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania in some episodes (for instance, Elwood City, like Erie, has a Mill Creek Mall). Various anthropomorphic animals populate the city itself. In some instances, animals are shown both in anthropomorphic form as well as realistic animal form (for example, Arthur has a realistically drawn pet dog, Pal, and two friends who are anthropomorphic dogs, Binky and Fern).

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