A woman stood peering through the glass window of the darkened Coffee Junction and Catonsville Village Bakery on Frederick Road, just after 11 a.m. last week.

Inside, the shop's owner, Chuck Quick, chatted with a reporter.

"We're closed," Quick said, loud enough for the knocking woman to hear.

"For how long?" the woman asked.

"Forever," Quick said.

"Forever?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

As realization slowly sank in, the woman turned and hurried away, disappointment on her face.

Quick looked down at the small two-person table where he sat and smiled, seemingly to hold back tears.

"They love coming here," Quick said of his many customers in town, who he said were dismayed when he told them he was closing the shop a few weeks ago.

"I'm getting beat up," he said, with another soft smile.

In more ways than one, the shuttering of the coffee shop and bakery at 803 Frederick Road after 17 years of business is the end of an era in Catonsville.

It not only removes one of the street's longest-standing gathering places, but sets adrift some of its most enduring baking recipes.

The story is both sticky and sweet.

Back in 1957, the German family of Frank Bruns first bought the little white shop on Edmondson Avenue known as the Catonsville Bakery and Delicatessen.

Bruns ran the shop for decades, whipping up more than 100 unique recipes for Danishes and doughnuts, cookies and cakes, muffins and brownies. People in town loved Bruns and his treats.

In 1992, the same year Quick and his wife, Donna, opened the Coffee Junction, Bruns sold his bakery to another couple, but kept the mortgage and retained rights to the business when it closed in 2000.

Catonsville residents were bereft of Bruns' beloved baked goods until April of 2001, when he and Quick announced a new partnership. Bruns would be baking again at the Coffee Junction -- which was converted into a bakery and re-purposed as the Coffee Junction and Catonsville Village Bakery.

Quick and Bruns began incorporating Bruns' recipes into the shop's offerings.

Then, in January of 2003, Bruns sold his original bakery on Edmondson Avenue to Chris and Holly Brown, a couple deeply involved with nearby Mount de Sales Academy who wanted to revitalize the bakery and use it as a business venture that would support the school.

With the purchase of the business went the rights to the name Catonsville Bakery and Delicatessen, all of Bruns' equipment -- and all of Bruns' recipes.

Later that month, Bruns died at the age of 69 from natural causes.

With the patriarch of Catonsville baking gone, some tension arose between Chris Brown and Chuck Quick over the Catonsville Bakery name -- with Bruns' popular recipes available in both places.

The Browns ran their shop for another year-and-a-half, until August of 2004, when the venture became too hard to manage -- largely, Chris Brown said, due to the county's refusal to allow updates on the property because of its proximity to a stream bed.

The Browns sold the business, and once again the Coffee Junction and Catonsville Village Bakery became the sole destination for Bruns' desserts.

Not long after, however, Chuck Quick's health began deteriorating, he said.

He has diabetes, and in recent years it has caused muscular atrophy in his feet, he said.

Quick, 55, had walked to work every day from his Bloomsbury Avenue home for years. Now, he no longer can.

He has worked 16 to 18 hour days, seven days a week, for years, he said, and his last day off was New Year's Day.

The work load simply became too much, he said, and closing the shop was something that could no longer be avoided.

"I'd been denying it and denying it for years," he said.

"I was very heartbroken when it became apparent I couldn't do it anymore."

For years, the Coffee Junction hosted poetry readings, live music and art shows and the Catonsville Village Bakery has had a loyal clientele.

Both incarnations of the shop were successes, Quick said.

"We wanted it to be a place where people could come meet people they'd never met," he said.

"We catered to everybody, from people with five-bedroom houses to homeless people, so it succeeded in becoming what we wanted it to be."

Tom Medicus, owner of the nearby Hilton Flower Shop on Frederick Road and a longtime friend of Quick's, said he knows many are sad to see Quick's shop go.

"I'm going to miss them a lot," Medicus said. "I was there every morning."

Medicus said he was also in the shop every Friday afternoon, when he and Quick would enjoy "a little social hour."

"I'm going to miss that too," Medicus said.

Quick said there are lots of things he will miss, and lots of fond memories he'll keep.

He met his wife in the shop.

He's watched teenagers he hired years ago grow up and have children of their own.

He remembers staining the shop's wood paneling with coffee when it first opened.

He still wakes up without an alarm clock every day at 3 a.m., ready to start baking.

He'll continue to bake, he said -- just not in his own shop.

Maybe at a grocery chain, or maybe at Ned Atwater's new shop planned for Frederick Road, he said.

"We'll miss this place, but there's a new door opening," he said.

As for Bruns' recipes, Quick still has some on an old pad of paper, he said.

Brown said he still has 44 of the original recipes, and he will share them as a way to raise money for Mount de Sales.

The school's last cookbook, full of recipes from the school's nuns and alumna collected by Holly Brown, was a huge fundraiser for the school, he said.

The only catch with many of Bruns' recipes is that they are written for commercial baking -- in weight, not volume -- and need converting.

But for Bruns' fans hungry to taste his legacy, there is now no other alternative.

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