By Gary Nelson | The Arizona Republic
Four years after General Motors turned out the lights on its Desert Proving Ground in Mesa, you’d hardly know the place.
The iconic white water tower is still there, although the GM logo has been painted over. A few of the old buildings remain,
fenced off and crumbling on the east side of Ellsworth Road.
The famous banked test track — the one with a lane that specified a minimum speed of 90 mph — has been all but demolished. The 2.4-mile straightaway is gone, too, as is almost everything else the car manufacturer built to test new models in harsh temperatures for more than 50 years.
What’s emerging now bears no resemblance to the industrial site. There’s a man-made lake, the first completed portion of what developers hope will be a regional park. There are model homes in varying stages of completion, roads unfinished, numerous small parks in progress.
