GRAND RAPIDS — Stricken with polio at age four, Eugene Colegrove's doctors at the Mary Free Bed hospital on Cherry Street told his parents he'd likely never walk again.

In fact, when he was ready to be discharged in 1956 at the tail end of the disease’s terrible sweep through Grand Rapids, Colegrove’s father brought the church deacon, fearing the worst upon receiving the call to come retrieve his son.

As Colegrove, now 60, waited behind a door with a surprise, the doctors stopped his family as they came around the bend in the fourth floor hallway.

“He turned around, and said, ‘C’mon Gene,’ and I walked out of that room,” said Colegrove, one of hundreds of local children who learned to walk again at the orphanage-turned-hospital during the 1940s and ’50s when the epidemic raged across the United States.

“Doctor Swanson chalked it up to prayers,” he said.

These days, the former D.A Blodgett Home for Children, built in 1908, now houses the Inner City Christian Federation. It anchors the Cherry Diamond Business District in the middle of a bustling East Hills neighborhood, which is undergoing a renaissance.

The red brick, U-shaped, four-story neoclassical building, located in the Fairmount Square Historic District, turns heads with its stately terra cotta columns fronting a lovingly kept Victorian garden. But it wasn’t always so beautiful.

When Colegrove entered the building as a patient in 1955, the courtyard and pillared porch had been gone for five years. In their place was what ICCF director Jonathan Bradford calls an “unspeakable scar” comprised of four ugly, utilitarian additions that doubled the building size after Mary Free Bed Guild took over the property in 1948.

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Originally built in 1908 as the D.A. Blodgett Home for Children. The neoclassical East Hills building was used by Mary Free Bed as a hospital for polio patients in the 1940s and ‘50s before it became vacant in the 1990s. The Inner City Christian Federation bought and restored the building in 2006.

Generous past: The building is named for pioneer lumber baron Delos Blodgett, who financed its construction but died just before the dedication. "It was but natural that the sympathies of my father would go out to the orphan," said son John Wood Blodgett in 1908.

Impact: Hundreds of children like Eugene Colegrove learned to walk again after being stricken with polio in Grand Rapids before the disease was eradicated. Meanwhile, polio patients like Colegrove weren't allowed to see their parents except on weekends.

Picture perfect: Having lived within a half-mile of the building his whole life, ICCF director Jonathan Bradford bought a 1920s postcard of the building in Frankfort around 2000 and kept it in his desk until snapping up the property when it hit the market in 2004.

“It was the ‘50s and we were awash with modernism,” Bradford said, simply.

But the utilitarian additions served their purpose of adding space for the hospital to accept the rising number of polio patients, totaling nearly 280 while Colegrove was admitted. The debilitating nervous system disease attacked children, crippling and deforming them.

A building full of youngsters was nothing new for a property that began life as an orphanage.

Atop the facade is the name of Delos A. Blodgett, a pioneer lumbar baron who financed the construction of the facility near the family’s Brookby estate on Plymouth Avenue SE at the request of his second wife, who had a soft sport for the kids in the family’s orphanage, Bradford said.

Construction was initially estimated at $50,000, but ran up to $150,000. The building was built to be as fireproof as possible and “memorable.”

Designed by Asbury W. Buckley, the D.A. Blodgett home was considered to be among the finest and best-equipped private philanthropic institutions in the state. The dedication was well-attended save for Blodgett himself, who died shortly before the facility was completed.

“He designed to give to this city a home for children that fire could not destroy, and of such sanitary construction that disease could be lessened and controlled,” said Delos’ son, John Wood Blodgett at the dedication.

Why? Because the health and vitality of the city would be defined by how it treats its children, Bradford said.

The facility grew obsolete, though, as society began to favor foster care over institutionalizing orphans. Mary Free Bed used extra space until the hospital took over entirely. It eventually outgrew the facility and moved to their current location in 1976.

While there as a patient, Colegrove got well acquainted with the ceiling, which featured black and white murals of cartoon figures like Mighty Mouse, Charlie Brown and Tom & Jerry.

“We nicknamed the night-shift nurse the ‘Sergeant At Arms,’” he said. “They were always grumpy.”

The additions were torn down in 2006 after the ICCF raised $8 million to buy and restore the property, which was nearing demolition after sitting vacant for more than a decade after an unsuccessful attempt by the William C. Abney Academy to develop it into a charter school.

Having been a crime-magnet for years, the building’s restoration has been a boost for the surrounding business district, which Bradford said has the highest occupancy rate of any in the city.

With ICCF, a nonprofit low-income housing provider as owner, Bradford said the building has come full circle; back in use by an organization dedicated to helping the poor.

“It’s a validation underscoring a value that was important to this community more than 100 years ago.”

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