OUR STREET - SHERALI STREET

This is the street we lived on - the street to and from school.

 Notice the small evergreen shrubs newly planted on the strip between sidewalk and street.
If you can imagine walking ten blocks with 20 pounds of backpack under a late afternoon sun in an average temperature of 105 degrees, well, it's hard to imagine for a Seattlite ( a resident, not a lite version).   I certainly couldn't have imagined it before I arrived.  Toward the middle of July the very thought of making this trek kept me in our air-conditioned school till late in the day.

So imagine my surprise when I learned that all the lovely plane trees that lined this street had been cut down.  The same plane trees that create such a deliciously cool bower over the main drag, Rudaki Avenue. Plane trees are related to the North American sycamore and can grow to prodigious heights.  Here are the plane trees over another street in Dushanbe.

So why would the city want to remove
a natural cooling system in a city that
normally gets roasted in the summer?  This is a city that features many fountains to cool its residents, some fronting office buildings and some in the city parks.  It gets so uncomfortable that most residents cool their concrete courtyards and not so verdant yards with copious amounts of water. Some hose down their outdoor living areas morning and evening, some even more often. 

One explanation I heard for clearing the trees was that plane trees caused hay fever.   Another explanation was that Sherali Street was made wider to accomadate more traffic.
I would go for that one.  Every night after we settled in to sleep the
inevitable roar of trucks thundering down the broadened street would punctuate the cool stillness.  By three or four in the morning the crescendo would come.  A perfect time to move goods through the city without having to deal with pedestrians.