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, and 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 and made a fortune doing it. His Irish-born wife, Catherine, spent a good part of that fortune giving things back, and 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, including the Bay Area Art Association and a community theater troupe called the Players de Noc, joined forces and turned it into the William Bonifas Fine Arts Center. The old gym became galleries, art studios, a pottery workshop, and a theater, and the place has run as the region’s arts center ever since.

It’s still doing both jobs the Bonifas family money paid for: a building for the community to gather in, and a memorial that doesn’t read like one. The Players de Noc are all volunteers and 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 — built because a widow wanted her husband remembered well.