Demolition started on Saturday to clean out ugly remnants of a car dealership that was there for 85 years.
You can see the identifiers for not one, but three parcels of properties all adjacent to one another in close proximity to the $100 M International-Design Award Winning Mesa Arts Center that was built 12 years ago one block to the west.
It's not know at this time if there's something called a "Brownfield issue" that might have contaminated this ground where a car sales/service dealership had operations for 85 years, but there are clean-ups and remediation of hazards available after EPA site evaluations and assessments if they are part of the development process. Time will tell.
Notice the huge gigantic billboard-like facades towering above one-or-two stories, all designed to catch the attention of drivers driving-in or driving-out of what was the commercial center of the City of Mesa.
That nostalgic honky-tonk era downtown is - thankfully - now gone to the suburbs. People who live there can now enjoy it all the want in the expanding sprawl they like to call home.
They started knocking down some of the buildings leaving piles of debris to get carted away. What you see in the image below is just the start to remove some of the existing buildings that will leave what used-to-be the showroom intact on the south side of Main Street directly across from a low-profile 3-story parking facility owned by the City of Mesa on a tree-lined block.
At this point-in-time June 2017 it's not clear or 'no-one-seems-to-know' what is getting envisioned, imagined or planned here with all sorts of different plans and/or proposals that have been thrown-in or thrown-out from both private stakeholders for a Mormon-Tabernacle-Choir-style concert hall that could compete with the Mesa Arts Center and public interest groups rallying for an open-space public park walkable thoroughfare with fountain water features and mixed use commercial/office and residential living/working spaces.
John Graham
Sunbelt Holdings.
He's worked wonders in Phoenix and Tempe [go find out what they are] for urban infill projects and at the same time has a new one in-the-works @ Mesa's Elliot Road
