Bangor’s Society Hall Ballroom comes back to life

For the first time in more than 50 years, the sound of music again will fill Society Hall Ballroom at 193 Exchange St. in Bangor from 7 p.m. to midnight this Saturday.

The fourth annual Beaux Arts Ball, presented as a fundraiser for the Robinson Ballet Company board of directors, will feature the music of Brian Cattell, lavish hors d’oeuvres and desserts created by Montes International Catering, a cash bar and dancing.

“The ball is going to be the first community event in the restored third-floor hall, built in 1892,” explained Helen Munsey, chair of the semiformal ball and a Robinson Ballet Company board member.

With Norumbega Hall on Harlow Street no longer available for such events, the ballet company scrambled to find another downtown site, settling on the newly restored Society Hall Ballroom, located in the historic Eugene C. Nichols Block at Exchange and York streets.

Alex Tessman and PROTEA, Behavioral Health Services, which owns the building, enthusiastically agreed to host the event in the top-floor ballroom unseen by dancers and musicians since around the 1950s.

“When we played the bunny hop in the ’50s, the floor bounced up and down,” recalled 86-year-old former orchestra leader Bill Stetson, of Brewer. “Everybody would crowd onto the dance floor.”

During Stetson’s five-year stint performing in the ballroom, then called the James W. Williams Post No. 12 American Legion Hall, crowds packed the hall Friday and Saturday nights.

“We performed on the old stage, used in the early days by Pullen’s Orchestra,” Stetson said. Pullen’s later blossomed into the Bangor Symphony Orchestra. “It was a very nicely run hall. A cop was stationed by the second-floor stairs to head off any troublemakers.”

The ground floor of the brick block originally housed the First National Bank, with second-floor offices and the third-floor Society Hall.

A survivor of the Great Fire of April 30, 1911, and 1960s urban renewal demolition, both of which claimed many downtown treasures, the Nichols Block is the only 19th-century structure remaining on Exchange Street.

For ticket information on the Beaux Arts Ball, call 866-3417. Tickets are $50 per person.