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“The Maltese have been here since the 1920s,” Antoinette says. “This building has a history.”

Photo by Tyler Anderson / National Post

Meanwhile, the two addresses to the west were once home to a travel agency and a pizza joint, with tenants upstairs, until a developer snapped them up with ambitions of transforming the site into nine new townhouses with rooftop terraces, high efficiency interior lighting, contemporary Italian Lube kitchens, soaker tubs, parking and a million-dollar asking price. The developer also had ambitions for the bake shop.

“He offered us a million dollars for the bakery and a million dollars for the house next door, which we also own — so two million dollars,” Antoinette says.

What can get overlooked, in the ongoing Toronto real estate narrative of skyrocketing home prices, is a parallel yarn about a city’s disappearing past; about old Macedonian shoe repair guys, Italian barbers, Polish delis and, yes, mom-and-pop Maltese bakeries, getting pushed out of a gentrifying area, either because of the owners’ advanced age, a dwindling customer base or a lucrative offer to sell. Progress comes and local history goes, and in a big city on a development bender, Malta Bake Shop could have been the next departure.

But a curious thing happened instead: Charlie and Antoinette turned down the two million.

“What are we going to do if we sell, we’re not young — but we’re not old — and this shop has been 40-years of our lives,” Antoinette says. “For me, it is not a job. I feel like the shop is more like our living room and our customers, they are like family.