The Wilma

In nineteen twenty-one, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra performed for a packed house in a brand-new building on Higgins Avenue. The building was called the Wilma, and it was the most ambitious piece of architecture Missoula had yet produced, an eight-story steel-framed tower designed by a Norwegian architect named Ole Bakke the first steel-framed high-rise in town.

The man who built it was William Simons, known locally as Billy, who had spent the previous decades in show business and building theaters across the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. He named the Wilma for his wife, a light opera artist named Edna Wilma. The building was designed as a complete entertainment facility: a Louis the Fourteenth-style theater with seating for more than a thousand people, a pipe organ, a swimming pool and gymnasium in the basement, a cafe, and apartments and offices on the upper floors. Uniformed ushers, canaries in cages, fresh flowers, red plush seats. Billy Simons wanted it understood that Missoula had arrived.

The Wilma survived the Depression as a movie palace, then a concert venue, then a combination of both. It has been many things across its hundred years without ever quite becoming something else. The pipe organ is gone. The swimming pool is long gone. But the theater is still there, still hosting shows on Higgins Avenue, still the most interesting building on the block. On certain evenings you can walk past and hear something through the walls, whatever the Wilma has decided to become that night.