It’s about time we presented the promised part deux to the Little Malta series. Michelle covered the electronics and the dough stuffed with cheese. I found myself more interested in the local colour. Like the big sign advertising service for your Colour TV.

As Michelle said, the windows of nearly every store displayed electronic goods. Which was especially interesting in the windows of the Slavic Bazaar, which in words boasted “Delicious varieties of delicacies,” but whose window displays bore megaphones, transistor radios, miniature televisions, and painted styrofoam cutouts of words like “radar.” It was a bizarre bazaar.

I found myself amused by numerous spelling errors, because that’s what I do in life.

But my favourite part of Little Malta had to be it’s tiniest Ambassador.

This little fella spent a good 20 minutes welcoming me to the area and giving me the lowdown on the goings on in Little Malta. My tour wouldn’t have been complete without his hospitality.

Stark and I went for a walk up Dundas to the Junction today. We are always fascinated by crumbling paint and old signs and have been trying to capture the glory that is old Dundas before it is completely and totally gentrified by hipsters and then glass condos. A lot of the stuff we found reminded me of my (still incomplete) Avenue U project.

When we walked far enough West (North? Who can keep track of Dundas’ shifting direction?) on Dundas, past the sight of our last gentrification photo project in the Junction, we reached a Maltese neighborhood. Who knew there was such a magical place? There was even a Maltese bakery promising something called Pastizzi. I thought that sounded promising, as anything that sounds like a combination of pasta and pizza would, but it was closed. Curses! I looked it up when we got home and pastizzi are ricotta-filled pastries. I MISSED OUT ON A NEW FORM OF DOUGH STUFFED WITH CHEESE. Goddammit. Well, reason enough to go back… unless the hipsters move in and it goes out of business first.

Anyway, walking back from the sadly closed pastizzeria (I have learned a new word, courtesy of Wikipedia) we passed a whackload of neat looking stores. It would seem that it is a hobby of THE ENTIRE Junction to collect old electronic and mechanical equipment. Almost every window, no matter what the content of the store, is filled with at least one old typewriter, transistor radio or product from brands like Electrolux or Westinghouse or RCA. Why? I don’t know. Maybe this is how the people of the Junction dealt with being denied alcohol for so many decades. But moving on, if there are two people in this world who appreciate the beauty of a broken radio from 1965, it is Stark and me.

So, a photo tour: Welcome to Toronto’s Little Malta

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