I love graffiti! Graffiti, peeling posters, and the layers and layers of stickers, chipping paint, and exposed bricks that make up a typical city wall. Toronto excels at this, despite various city government wars on everything from graffiti to flyers on telephone poles. Our neighborhood has some choice examples.

There are the tags:

And then there are the wild beasts!

Uh oh!

Help us, Xena!

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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The residents of North Slope, or High Park as it is formally known, are an outspoken people. They wear their politics on their bumper stickers, hang them in their windows, and sometimes even scrawl them out on public structures.

Some of their theories are more…controversial than others.

And sometimes they express more personal entreaties.

And sometimes they simply furrow their brows and engage your sense of disgrace.

Let the finger-wagging commence!

Toronto loves its canine population. I was surprised when I first moved here how many dogs there were in the city’s downtown core, living among the highrises. Big dogs, too, even great danes and wolf hounds living in one-bedrooms. Toronto loves dogs, and it’s built a number of landmarks to accommodate its furry residents.

Doggies walking through the parkette at Yonge and Gloucester can drink merrily in memory of Barney.

There are plenty of unofficial dog pee stations throughout the city, but the one at Church and Alexander is the first I have seen with a dedicated sign.

Parks throughout the city offer fenced off-leash areas for the pups to run around and frolic. High Park’s off-leash area is by far the most expansive, including not only an open dog park with running water, but some fenced trails as well.

Oh, and it even has its own fire hydrant!

Toronto doggies are well looked after.

Last year Michelle and I lost our kind, beautiful friend Kelley to colon cancer. While she was still alive, Kelley led her team, Kelley’s Angels, in the North York General Hospital’s Underwear Affair. They all dressed as Angels and rocked that walk. During the walk, Kelley and the team decided on the next year’s theme: Kel’s Angels. Time to get tough and gear up in our biker best.

Kelley didn’t make it to see this year’s walk, but the rest of us carried out that plan anyway, with a team twice the size of last year’s.

We geared up in our best leathers.

Teamed up with some wicked women.

And enjoyed one of the most beautiful days we have had this summer, walking and chanting and cheering along Toronto’s Beaches Boardwalk.

Together the Angels raised over $30,000 this year to help fund treatments and, hopefully, find cures for cancers below the waist.

Queen West is mostly a nightmare of gentrification, but in between the clubs and boutiques you will find it is still full of relics of the old city.

You don’t see many phone booths at all around town anymore, let alone these receiver-shaped phones.

And you know it’s an oldie by the price—most phone booths have gone to 50 cents by now. I remember when they switched to 35 cents in 1998 and I was pissed.

The Big Bop closed this last January after 25 years on that corner. The building is historical and won’t be knocked down for any developments, barring any mysterious fires like the one that coincidentally occurred just after a strip of buildings wanted for condo redevelopment had been designated historical landmarks in 2008 (which the police took all of one afternoon to investigate…hmmm). The Big Bop was a cornerstone of Toronto’s club history. You can learn more about it and the historical context it occupied with this little video farewell to the place.