You’d think that, given the size and beauty of the old sycamores that line 1600 East, I’d have looked up once. Nope.

It wasn’t until this fall, when my dear friend who lives on that block mentioned that she wasn’t getting the leaf avalanche she expected, that I craned my neck and checked them out. The leaves are crabbed, bark is scaling off the trunks and every sycamore on the block just looks exhausted.

So, after rooting around on the Internet, I called Salt Lake City’s Urban Forestry division to get the scoop.

Turns out the sycamores — properly known as London plane trees — have been whopped by a “perfect storm” of maladies, says urban forester Bill Rutherford.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen it happen” in all his years of tree-caring, Rutherford said.

But all is not lost. Urban Forestry is seeking city money to spray the sycamores, which make up less than 3 percent of the city forest, next spring.

In the meantime, Rutherford said, residents can help a lot by maintaining “careful sanitation” — raking up leaves, twigs and branches and carefully disposing of them to help eliminate the spores that infect the trees.

This could take all winter. Sycamores have the unusual characteristic of shedding leaves a little later than other trees, and then shedding all through the winter, Rutherford says.

Pointedly, he does not want people to think, as he put it, “the sky is falling.