Judith Burke was walking back to her...

Judith Burke was walking back to her car on Bunker Hill after a pleasant evening at the ballet when she saw a group of tiny four-legged creatures executing a series of dazzling allegros and tours en l’air.

“Rats,” she said. “Big rats. Huge rats. At least 200 of them, in a frenzy. They were in this lot, covered with weeds, where a couple of transients were sleeping. . . . I ran.”

This wasn’t the first sighting of real rat-packers in the area.

Wells Fargo Center--where Burke’s car was parked--recently sent out a warning to its tenants declaring that “the Bunker Hill area is experiencing an infestation of rodents.”

Well, Burke and Wells Fargo may be relieved to know that the county’s vector control program says it has found the cause of the rat boom.

“There’s this transient living up there. It’s between Hope and Flower (streets), between 1st Street and (Gen.) Thaddeus Kosciuszko Way . . . ,” one staff worker said Monday. “This guy sits there behind the oleander, reading his newspapers and eating . . . and leaving a lot of turkey carcasses lying about, with lots of green lettuce and stuff. That’s a big food source, and it’s created a large rat problem.”

And, to think, you probably suspected that the rats were unleashed by something like the Metro Rail construction project or the breaking of ground for skyscrapers like the Wells Fargo Center.

Mention of Kosciuszko Way, the two-block tongue-twister named after a Polish general in the Revolutionary War, recalls a joke once recounted by retired Los Angeles Police Lt. Dan Cooke:

“Back in the 1930s when I was growing up in New York, I remember hearing the story about a horse dropping dead on Kosciuszko Street (in New York). The policeman calling in to headquarters couldn’t pronounce the name of the street. So he dragged the horse down to the next block.”

In a real-life situation years later, flustered Los Angeles police detectives tried to radio for assistance from Kosciuszko Way. “The location they gave sounded like ‘Olivekosco,’ ” Cooke said. “They were asked to repeat it again and again. . . . Finally, they just said, ‘One block south of 1st Street.’ ”

Inglewood artist Dustin Shuler has been commissioned to build a sculpture consisting of nine automobiles impaled on a 50-foot spike for a shopping center in Berwyn, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. Some Berwyners aren’t happy about it.

“It’s a pile of junk cars being put up, and you could just as well go to a junkyard and get the same effect,” state Sen. Judy Topinka said.

Shuler disagrees. “I’m dealing with the products of our society,” said the artist, whose work has been displayed in museums and at art festivals, not to mention a Department of Motor Vehicles office in San Jose.

His nine-jalopy impalement, “Spindle,” is reminiscent of a less grand piece, “Death of an Era,” in which he dropped a 20-foot nail through the roof of an unsuspecting 1959 Cadillac.

Shuler, who was hired to fashion “Spindle” by the company that owns the Berwyn mall, says the sculpture sets a good example.

“It doesn’t make any noise,” the artist said. “And it doesn’t pollute.”