The St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish in Bay City is one of the ten oldest Polish parishes in the United States (sixth oldest, founded in the same year as St. Adalbert Parish in Chicago and St. Hyacinth Parish in Toledo), and was organized by Father Kazimierz Rochowski. The first church, designed by the prominent local architect Leverett Anson Pratt and dedicated on 13 December 1874, was made of wood and could accommodate two hundred people.

Bay City, where in 1958 Madonna was born to an Italian family, in the second half of the 19th century was a town which attracted immigrants from Europe with its rapidly growing shipbuilding and timber industries. The influx of Poles, mainly from Greater Poland, soon rendered the first church too small.

The new church (constructed in the years 1889- 1892) was designed by Pratt & Koeppe, the leading architectural company in Bay City in 1880-1910, and built by the companies run by Ben Burbrigde and Andrew Thompson. It was an imposing Gothic Revival structure, designed for 1500 people, with skeleton frame construction (steel, yellow brick, concrete, stone) and architectural details made from oak inside and brick outside.

The church is a pseudo-basilica with a transept with a protruded, polygonally closed chancel, to which are added two chapels and two lower rooms, the sacristy and a utility room. The three aisles are separated by slender bundles of columns with composite capitals, supporting the cross vault. The two-tower façade is wider than the body. In its center there is a large stained-glass window, and in the lower part there are three stepped portals with decorative gabled roofs, topped with crosses. Over the window there is a statue of the Virgin Mary and Child styled as the late Gothic “Beautiful Madonna”. The outer walls are ornamented with false windows, an arcade frieze and buttresses.

The form of the church was characteristic of the historicized ecclesiastical style prevalent at the time. It was a manifestation of an ideological and artistic attitude, which deliberately referred to the past, emphasizing the antiquity of the place and of the community which founded the church. In the case of Bay City the church hallmarked one of the oldest Polish parishes in the USA. Gothic Revival was also associated with cathedrals in Europe, including the cathedrals in Polish lands, which emigrants had left because of poverty, but also because of the persecution by the Prussian, Russian or Austrian authorities.

Noteworthy is the church’s stylistic coherence, as well as its spaciousness, fine lighting and elegant proportions. The interior features Gothic Revival wood carved altars matching the character of the church, placed there by 1903. In 1974 they were redesigned by the architect Rex M. Reittenback, who was given the difficult task of adapting the interior to the postVatican II changes in liturgy. At that time the floor of the chancel was raised and the main altar was reinforced with steel elements and moved closer to the nave. All the statues were removed from both the main altar and side altars, creating openwork structures with new wooden sculptures. A post-concilliary marble altar was placed in the chancel.

The stained-glass windows featuring saints and religious symbols were installed already in the year of the completion of the church (they were renovated before 2008). In 1909 the church obtained four bells made by Meneely & Co in Watervliet, N. Y. The largest of them, Stanisław Kostka, was placed in the southern tower. The bells in the northern tower are: Maria Anna (funded by the Confraternity of Women of the Holy Rosary), Edward Joseph (funded by the parish priest Fr. Edward Kozłowski and priests: Józef Kamiński and Jan Gatzke) and Elizabeth (funded by the Confraternity of St. Elizabeth of Hungary).

The sacristy houses a suit of liturgical vestments, consisting of a chasuble, a dalmatic and a stole, produced by the La Societe Pierre Pampalon factory in Montreal (Canada) at the end of the 1970s. They are made of golden silk fabric with the motif of angels in a mandorla. The chasuble is decorated with the image of Christ the King (embroidered and painted) and the motif of holly with fruits.

A very valuable object from the first years of the functioning of the church is a set of chalice and paten, which is said to have been donated by Father Józef Dąbrowski from Orchard Lake, an important organizer of the Polish religious and social life in the USA. In 1889 a convention of the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America was held in the Bay City parish. Even though the commemorative photograph does not include Father Dąbrowski, as a co-founder of the organization and founder of the Polish Seminary of St. Cyril and Methodius in Detroit (1885) he was deeply involved in the religious affairs of the Polish community in the US and was a frequent visitor to Bay City. It is possible that the set was made for the occasion of this convention. The chalice stands out among the liturgical objects used in the Polish Cathedrals due to its Classicist form and deep theological content. On its foot there are small statuettes of theological virtues, the base of the stem is decorated with scenes of the Passion of Christ, and in the upper part putti support the cup which features the depiction of the Last Supper.

Opposite the church to the west there is a threestorey school building from 1910-1914 (in 1940 a sports hall was added to it) with a historicized design by the Pratt & Koeppe company. On the church grounds there is a statue of Immaculate Mary – a monument to the parishioners killed during the First World War.

In 2014 the Diocese of Saginaw decided to create a new parish of Our Lady of Czestochowa comprising the St. Stanislaus Kostka Church and the St. Hyacinth Church. Masses in Polish are not celebrated due to the sparseness of the local Polish community.

Chronology

1874 - establishment of the parish in Bay City and construction of a wooden church

1878–79 - construction of a school building

1885 - enlarging the church building

1889–92 - construction of a new brick church

1909 - installation of bells in the church towers

1910–14 - construction of a new school building

1914 - construction of new stairs in front of the church

1921 - construction of the new presbytery

1927 - construction of a convent for the Felician Sisters (it was demolished around 2000, and a parish center was erected on the same spot)

1940 - construction of a sports hall adjacent to the school

1951 - remodeling of the upper storeys of the towers and opening of the parish high school

1974 - renovation to the church and making changes to its altars

2014 - establishment of the Our Lady of Czestochowa Parish of Bay City

Text originally published in a book issued by the POLONIKA Institute.
Anna Sylwia Czyż, Bartłomiej Gutowski, Paweł Sieradzki, Polish Parishes and Churches in Milwaukke, Winsconsin and Massachusetts, Warszawa 2021, pp.​​​​​​​ 159-167.