Both properties changed hands last year when a group of investors with an eye for future wealth-creation in a downtown Opportunity Zone bought up eight commercial properties directly on Main Street along the line of the Valley Metro Light Rail Extension into the Central Business District that opened on August 14, 2015.
While downtown Mesa has always been promoted by city officials and mainstream media as "vibrant and exciting", and a great place to live, work and play, "The Old Donut-Hole" has been neglected for 40 years - it now qualifies as an Ozone to attract investor-million$ pouring money into Qualified Investment Funds - one is The Caliber Wealth Creation Fund.
At the same time he's holding public office, last year conservative Mesa Mormon Republican Mega-Millionaire gambled what he said was $20M in private investments to form a number of holding companies hoping to profit off property value-increases usually associated with transit-oriented development.
The two properties advertised as available for retail now- 137 W Main Street and 155 W Main Street - are shown at bottom left. Behind their facades that you can see in the images below, there's a lot of history to be told about how just two of Mesa's early 20th-Century downtown business owners created their own wealth generations ago by mixing up politics and real estate investments. 155 W Main Street provides some details sketched out here.
Flash-forward 100 years to 2018 what you see-is-what-you get offered on the market now in the 21st Century in the Zombie-Retail area on Main Street. The QIFs are still waiting for guidance and all the rules/regulations from the U.S. Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service that could (or might) transform or restore or re-vitalize Downtown Mesa along the line of light rail. Nearly everyone - city officials and millionaires - are still waiting for that 'Salvation Train' to deliver on its promises - from Buy-and-Hold to Wait-and-See.
As you can see, the two available sites advertised for retail" need some work" . . .a lot. 
155 W Main Street
< Take a look at this image captured a few days ago from the north side of Main Street.
The building has been vacant for years.
What's hard to see in the perspective is a 6-ft tall 600-pound bronze statue of the founder Zebulon Pearce that was installed on the sidewalk in 2014 during construction of the Valley Metro Light Rail extension into the Central Business District. Some people might consider the statue 'bad public art.
(Some details farther down).
Here's the other available-for-retail property:
137 W Main Street
Hard-to-believe it now, but this one-story supply store made fortunes for the original founder supplying equipment for the federally-financed construction of The Roosevelt Dam in the early 1900's. There were traffic jams on Main Street. In the 1930's another federally-financed WPA Project for water lines on First Avenue added to the revenues that created a hardware empire of 9 stores throughout the Valley as well as real estate development in the LDS Temple Area.
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Let's, however, not get ahead of ourselves here in this brief snippet post today:
"You might not have noticed with all the light-rail construction on Main Street, but the city has a new monument to one of its giants.
Unveiled last Saturday, the 6-foot, 600-pound bronze statue is a tribute to a man who did one of the greatest things a man can do for his city:
He brought us beer.
Zebulon "Zeb" Pearce was many things. A mayor. A council member. A produce and feed store owner. An entrepreneur. And a Mormon. . . Even though his father was a Mormon and raised him in the church, Zeb married a Methodist. . ".
< This is the 6-foot 600-pound bronze statue where it stands today.[ image is from August 2017]
It still stands there today, along with an information plaque on the base. The company distributed Coors Beer brewed in Colorado.
(There are now two local hand-crafted breweries here in downtown Mesa: Desert Eagle and Oro Micro-Brewery.)
". . . Which makes his additional vocation as Mesa's first beer distributor after Prohibition a little ironic, according to his great-granddaughter, Meghan Pearce, who runs the Pearce Family Foundation.
Pearce ran a produce company and had one of first large refrigerated coolers, which made him a prime candidate for a Coors distributorship. The building that housed his original produce and feed and grain business still stands at 155 W. Main St., though the business has long-since moved. [2003]
"Zeb Pearce, who died in 1969, was a true pioneer. His family came to Arizona in a covered wagon from Mississippi in 1877 and settled in Mesa in 1882.
His family owned 120 acres at Country Club and Main Street.
His family owned 120 acres at Country Club and Main Street.
Young Zeb attended the Territorial Normal School, which eventually became Arizona State University. He taught school for 11 years before opening his produce business in 1911.
In addition to serving on the council and his two years as mayor, he served on the Mesa School Board and was a founding member of ASU's Sun Angel Foundation."
