Mesa ramps up branding, boosting Asian District | News | eastvalleytribune.com – East Valley Tribune
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Updated: February 2, 2022 @ 7:06 am
Mesa’s Asian District has evolved into a 2-mile stretch along Dobson Road between Southern Avenue and Main Street.
Mesa’s Asian District has evolved into a 2-mile stretch along Dobson Road between Southern Avenue and Main Street.
For all the hard work that city planners do to create vibrant communities, sometimes the best stuff just happens all by itself.
To wit: Veteran Mesa City Hall reporters can recall no instance in which the planning staff decided to spin a west-side Asian District out of thin air, and no City Council meetings directing that such a thing be done.
Yet, Mesa does have an Asian District – one that has grown organically over the past two-plus decades as Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans and other Asians opened restaurants, shops and other businesses along a two-mile stretch of Dobson Road between Southern Avenue and Main Street.
Eventually the city took notice, helping the neighborhood create a new brand and formally creating the capitalized Asian District in early 2020.
Now the effort to give the area its own visual identity is ramping up.
City Council on Jan. 24 approved a two-year contract, at $100,000 a year, to buy and install street signs calling attention to the neighborhood’s Asian heritage.
Further, the city is looking for – and will pay – artists to create murals for the district.
The street signs will come from a company called YESCO LLC, which already has built signs for the Mesa Arts Center and the Falcon District.
Because of the company’s history with Mesa, staffers told the City Council in a report that they chose not to seek bids from other vendors. Instead, Mesa will be working off a contract that the City of Peoria developed with the company as a result of its own competitive bidding process.
The signs will use a logo that already has been developed for the district. The logo is based on a geometric pattern called a tangram, which is believed to have roots in ancient China and which can symbolize the meshing of different cultures to form a unified whole.
In addition to the new street signs, Mesa plans to install banners on street poles, traffic signal box wraps and large banners on various buildings this spring to identify the Asian-themed businesses.
The mural project is in its very early stages.
Mesa is giving artists until Feb. 25 to submit art samples, biographies and other documents that will help the city decide whose work will adorn the district.
The city wants murals at least 10 feet wide by 8 feet high, and potentially larger than 30 by 16 feet. The pictures can be stand-alone or serve as part of a mural panel.
Mesa will pay between $2,000 and $8,000 for the smaller murals, and more for the bigger ones. Prices will be negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
Interested artists can find details online at selectmesa.com/asiandistrict.
“This project was born out of ideas from the Asian District steering committee as a way to celebrate the culture and community and add even more reasons for people to visit and enjoy the area, said District 3 City Councilman Francisco Heredia. “We’re looking forward to the outcome.”
The neighborhood’s Asian identity began to develop in the 1990s with a small cluster of businesses at Southern Avenue and Dobson.
It gained momentum with the creation of Mekong Plaza, a supermarket-anchored indoor mall in an old Target store. Although the Great Recession stalled the project, it opened about 2008, roughly in tandem with the arrival of light rail in west Mesa.
The latest big addition was H Mart, which opened in June 2020 in a former Albertson’s store on the southeast corner of Dobson and Main Street.
Mesa’s Asian heritage, however, goes much farther back in time. The Wong family, originally from China, operated a general store at the corner of Main Street and Mesa Drive that helped supply crews building Roosevelt Dam in the first decade of the 20th century.
The Wong family’s building was demolished about a decade ago to make way for a light-rail park-and-ride.
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