UPDATED KEY STREET
Belinsky Street today is one of the central city thoroughfares, always bustling, crowded, filled with the noise of business and the movement of cars and trolleybuses. Behind the rows of poplars and elms that line it, beautiful modern buildings can be seen - residential houses, institutions, dormitories, and shops. Nothing here reminds of the former Key Street.
Key... Where it began, behind Tashkent Street, there used to be a group of springs - keys. One of them, the largest, was lined with stone slabs, and from it the residents of the nearby streets took water for drinking. The water in the springs "gushed forth." Hence the name of the street.
Later, the spring was filled in. Now, in its place, there is a powerful artesian well supplying water to the city’s water supply network.
At the end of the last century, a ditch was laid down the middle of the street by the residents - Dungans and Russians - owners of mills, from the Ala-Archa River. It provided water for the Dungan rice mill located between the current Kyiv Street and Lenin Avenue.
Before the revolution, at the corner of Key Street and Merchant Street (Lenin Avenue), on the site of the current multi-story building with grocery store No. 7, there stood a Russian-native school built by the Dungans. The school building was destroyed during the Civil War.
In the 1950s, in connection with the construction of the trolleybus line, the street underwent a radical reconstruction: the ditch was diverted, and the riverbed was filled in, the street was paved and covered with asphalt. During these years, several two-story houses were built on it.
In 1953, Key Street, that is, its part up to the railway, was named after the great Russian critic V. G. Belinsky, while the other part beyond the railway line became known as Novo-Belinsky.
A noticeable transformation of the street occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. Multi-story buildings sprang up on it. Among them was the first nine-story residential building in the street and the city, with 208 apartments and shops "Bakyt" and "Okean," a hairdresser, and a café (architect E. Pisarskaya, 1973). In 1978, another nine-story building - an experimental monolithic 36-apartment residential tower - was completed at the corner of Toktogul Street. Its unusual height and appearance attracted the attention of the townspeople. At the corner of Kyiv Street, in a multi-story building, an art salon opened, where one could purchase works by artists of the republic and applied arts. At the corner of Frunze Street, another educational building of the Kyrgyz University was erected, and almost at the railway line, a nine-story residential building with a grocery store "Kerme-Tuu" was completed.
Behind the 50th Anniversary of the Kyrgyz SSR Avenue, one can reach the Botanical Garden of the Kyrgyz University, established in 1947, as well as an interesting place where you can see almost all representatives of the animal world of Kyrgyzstan - the Zoological Base. Animals caught by hunters in the republic are sent from here to zoos not only in our country but also in many countries around the world. Here is also the only snake nursery-terrarium in the Soviet Union.
Losev D. S., Kochkunov A. S. What the Streets Tell
Streets of Bishkek
