••• From R.: “The young day manager at Morgan’s Market told me on Saturday that he had seen with his own eyeballs (confirmed by the eyeballs of several delivery guys, he said) a fellow working Bogardus Plaza with a large black plastic bag, catching rats. He had a swooping motion that somehow caught the rats off guard, and had captured fifteen or twenty of them. This was around 7:30 a.m. last week. My informant thought the rats were slow because they had been poisoned. He had no idea what the trapper was going to do with them, but darkly hinted that eating a poisoned rat would be a bad idea. The whole thing seemed preposterous, but clearly had your name on it.” (Gee, thanks.) The folks at Friends of Bogardus Garden find this tale mystifying, since they haven’t had rats in months, poison hasn’t been put out for a year, and they haven’t hired any baggers. Anyone see anything firsthand? (Related, from FOBG: “In the new design we are most likely putting in a layer of what’s essentially steel wool about 4 inches under the planted areas to deter any future rats from making their home in the garden.”)

••• M. M. De Voe of Pen Parentis tweeted that the Irving Farm café in Fulton Center opens a week from today, and it looks like it’ll have “outside” seating.

••• I went to the new Leather Spa to see if they could fix the torn seam on my wallet, but they said it’d take two weeks because it has to go to Queens. (Even I know Queens isn’t that far away.) Can you recommend someone around here who can fix it onsite?

••• From a reader: “72 Reade is being converted to retail. Big space is 15k sq ft split among ground and cellar.  The space is block-through to Duane—here used to be a dry cleaners on the Duane St side and they are also gone—but the Reade St entrance is much nicer and more usable than Duane.”

••• Something going by the name of “Stink” is shooting in the Warren/North End Ave. area of Battery Park City on Friday and Saturday. I bet it’s this ad agency.

••• I keep walking by this door (342 Canal, but the door is on Church) and wondering what Current is; it appears to be for the second floor, but the name is ungoogleable. What I did find online, however, was a rendering for what could become of that building (which I had heard was going to be a McDonald’s, but that appears to have fallen by the wayside). There’s no reason I can see to think the rendering is anything but speculative.