A lumber baron's widow built Escanaba an arts center

The handsome Romanesque hall where Escanaba goes to see a play or take a pottery class started out as a school gymnasium. There’s a love story buried in its stone. “Big Bill” Bonifas came over from Luxembourg in the 1880s to cut timber in the Upper Peninsula. He made a fortune doing it. His Irish-born wife, Catherine, spent a good part of that fortune giving things back. In 1938 she paid to build an auditorium and gym for St. Joseph’s parish school in his memory. She had it raised in golden Kasota stone — a warm, honey-colored limestone quarried in Minnesota. So the building glows on a sunny day.

When the parish school eventually closed, the stone hall didn’t sit empty for long. In 1974 a cluster of local arts groups joined forces to save it. They included the Bay Area Art Association and a community theater troupe called the Players de Noc. Together they turned it into the William Bonifas Fine Arts Center. The old gym became galleries, art studios, a pottery workshop, and a theater. The place has run as the region’s arts center ever since.

It’s still doing both jobs the Bonifas family money paid for. It’s a building for the community to gather in, and a memorial that doesn’t read like one. The Players de Noc are all volunteers. They stage plays and musicals through the year on the same floor where parish kids once shot baskets. Climate-controlled galleries upstairs and down rotate exhibitions, including loans from serious collections. For a small U.P. city, it’s a lot of culture under one golden roof. A widow built it because she wanted her husband remembered well.