The old San is now a federal fortress

Wealthy people once came to Battle Creek to eat yogurt, take cold baths, and get their abdomens vibrated by machines. The grand white building they came to still stands on West Van Buren Street, six stories of Italian Renaissance Revival that the architect Frank M. Andrews finished in 1903. This was the Battle Creek Sanitarium — “the San” — the wellness empire Dr. John Harvey Kellogg ran on a strict regimen of fresh air, exercise, vegetarian food, and ideas that ranged from sensible to deeply strange. Henry Ford came. So did President Taft. In 1928 the place added a fifteen-story tower with a two-story colonnade of thirty-two Ionic columns and more than 265 hotel-style rooms, because the rich kept coming.

Then the bottom fell out. The Depression gutted the San’s clientele, and in 1942 the U.S. Army bought the whole complex for $2.25 million and turned it into Percy Jones Army Hospital. Where guests had once sipped wheat-flake gruel, surgeons now rebuilt the bodies of wounded soldiers — close to 95,000 of them passed through during and after World War II. Three of those patients went on to the U.S. Senate: Philip Hart of Michigan, who left an arm’s use behind on Utah Beach; Bob Dole of Kansas, his right arm shattered in Italy; and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, who lost an arm in the same war.

That last fact is why the building carries the name it does. In 2003 the complex was rededicated as the Hart-Dole-Inouye Federal Center, after the three senators who’d been mended there. It now houses the Defense Logistics Agency and other federal offices — a working government campus where you can still trace, in the columns and the long brick wings, the outline of the strangest health resort America ever built.