The Milford Guitar Shop That Refused to Die, and Landed a Role in a Disney Movie

To find Route 1 Guitars, you go around back. The shop’s website says it in capital letters: “ENTER THROUGH BACK DOOR – SAME PARKING LOT AS MILFORD BANK.” The same page carries a note that tells you a lot about who runs the place: “On occasion we may run late due to bank, family, etc… please forgive us, we are a small operation.”

That small operation, at 189 Bridgeport Ave., has been open for more than 20 years. It exists because one customer couldn’t stand to see a guitar shop disappear.

‘I just couldn’t let one of the last private shops disappear’

John Bruno’s story is told in an undated profile in the trade magazine The Music & Sound Retailer. Before the store, John was a local musician who worked in computer and software support and taught guitar now and then. His wife, Gail, had spent more than a decade in the corporate world. Owning a music store, the magazine wrote, “would not have likely been at the top of the list.”

“My whole life, I loved going into mom-and-pop guitar shops and really did not love the huge chain stores,” John told the magazine.

His local shop was Milford Music Studio, opened in 1990 by Michael Nunno, John’s good friend and distant cousin. John had been a customer since the day it opened. At the time it was one of three independent music stores in the area. By the end of the decade, a Sam Ash and a Guitar Center had opened in nearby towns.

“They really destroyed the retail business and the store was on the verge of closing, surviving mostly on lessons,” John said.

Then Nunno told him he was closing. “I was shocked,” John recalled. “So, I made him an offer to purchase his entire inventory, officially closing Milford Music Studios and opening Route 1 Guitars. I just couldn’t let one of the last private shops disappear.”

Learning the business from scratch

Route 1 Guitars opened in September 2005. The magazine called what followed “a steep learning curve.” Gail, whom the magazine described as the store manager, took guitar and bass lessons so she would understand what she was selling. John read books, did research and leaned on friends for advice about running a store.

When the magazine profiled them, John and Gail were the store’s only two employees. We haven’t confirmed whether that’s still true, and it’s one of the first things we’ll ask. The shop’s current website still describes a hands-on operation. It offers one-on-one lessons at $30 a half hour, “and you pay as you go, one at a time!” It also lists set-up work for guitars, basses, banjos, mandolins, violins and ukuleles, and advertises back-to-school instrument rentals.

Its tagline: “The best little guitar shop around.”

The website also names John as the shop’s owner and shows off his own playing: it lists Walt Disney Records albums of Disney songs reworked as hard rock, with “the owner of Route 1 Guitars” on guitar.

A cameo on Disney+

In fall 2021, Hollywood came to the shop. Chang Can Dunk, a Disney+ movie about an Asian American teen in a marching band who bets the school’s star athlete he can dunk a basketball by Homecoming, was shot in Stamford, Stratford, Milford and Bridgeport from mid-October to early December 2021, CT Insider reported. Route 1 Guitars was the location for the scene where Chang and Kristy, the classmate he has a crush on, visit a music store.

The shop still points to it proudly: “Check out the scene in ‘Chang Can Dunk’ on Disney+ Filmed at our shop!!”

‘Find your dunk’

The film’s director, Jingyi Shao, told CT Insider what he hoped viewers would take from the movie: “I want people to think about maybe that thing — maybe it’s a small thing, maybe it’s a big thing — that they really want to do and they haven’t started yet. And I want them to just start and see how far they get.”

It’s a fair description of what happened on Bridgeport Avenue in 2005. A musician with a tech job and a manager with a corporate career had no plan to own a store. Then a friend’s shop was about to close, so they bought its inventory and figured out the rest as they went.

The chain-store squeeze John described didn’t go away. Neither did Route 1 Guitars. More than 20 years after he bought a friend’s inventory rather than watch it close, the store is still one of the independent shops he was determined to save. If you’ve never been, park in the Milford Bank lot and use the back door.

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Photos courtesy of Route 1 Guitars (route1guitars.com and @route1guitarsllc on Instagram).