neighbor

One of Hollywood’s legendary music recording studios is for sale as its owner prepares to end his half-century run immortalizing many of the biggest acts.

The list of household names who have recorded at Conway Recording Studios spans generations and genres. Burt Bacharach, Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Wonder, U2, Guns N’ Roses, Daft Punk, Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar are just a few of the artists who have recorded there.

While many studios have struggled, the unique space has attracted big names for decades.

Digital production tools and home studios have eliminated much of the need for traditional recording space, allowing artists to produce professional-quality music almost anywhere, real estate data provider CoStar said.

The digital revolution rocked the analog world of art, media and communication on a scale the industrial revolution did to agrarian and handicraft economies more than a century ago. The advent of Pro Tools recording software in the 1990s and the rise of music streaming services in the early aughts irrevocably changed the business.

Yet industry veterans say surviving facilities with expansive live rooms, vintage gear and decades of recording history may be becoming more valuable as they become harder to replicate. U.S. recorded-music revenue rose 7% to $6 billion in the first half of 2026, according to the Recording Industry Assn. of America. Streaming, physical formats and licensing all posted gains.

Conway Recording Studios is a jungly hideaway on bustling Melrose Avenue created by a transplant from chilly Buffalo, N.Y., who arrived in the 1970s with a vision to create an L.A.-style oasis in the middle of the city where he could pursue his craft as a sound engineer.

“I moved to California to be outside in the warm,” Buddy Brundo said. “I like sunlight.”

He defied recording studio conventions by bringing in natural light through large, soundproof windows instead of working in chambers sealed on all sides.

“You kind of feel like you’re in Hawaii or somewhere else,” at Conway studios, said entertainment real estate broker Nicole Mihalka of CBRE. “That’s what’s kept Conway so busy over the years.”

Among the musicians who came to work there lately was Korean pop group BTS, the subject of a Netflix documentary released in March that followed the young men as they recorded their comeback album “Arirang” after completing their military service.

Brundo appears in the film.

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1. “You kind of feel like you’re in Hawaii or somewhere else,” a real estate broker said of the studios. “That’s what’s kept Conway so busy over the years.” 2. Conway’s clients have included Justin Timberlake, Kendrick Lamar, U2 and Counting Crows. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Taylor Swift is a regular and once created a run on company merchandise by wearing a Conway Recording Studios sweatshirt in public.

People have asked Brundo for years when he might sell the studio he has operated since 1976, said Mihalka, who has the listing.

“Ten years ago I wouldn’t even think about this,” Brundo said. Now, “I’m 83, and how long can I keep this up? It’s best to walk away while I still can.”

He works out three times a week and appears fit, jumping up to play air guitar to Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” while showing off the powerful sound system in Studio B. The band recorded the hit 1987 album of the same name at Conway Studios, where members arrived by motorcycle.

Brundo is asking $15 million for the property that spans more than an acre on the edge of Melrose Hill, a niche neighborhood at Melrose and Western avenues known for its trendy restaurants.

It includes three studios, offices, tons of recording equipment, including two grand pianos, lounges, and a kitchen that pointedly lacks a stove.

“Every studio I worked with had a stove, and the kitchen was a mess,” Brundo said.

“Ten years ago I wouldn’t even think about this,” Conway’s Buddy Brundo said. Now, “I’m 83, and how long can I keep this up? It’s best to walk away while I still can.”

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Not that he hasn’t gone out of his way to accommodate his clients. Years ago he shrank his own office to enlarge a lounge for a singer-songwriter who needed space to camp out.

“Courtney Love wanted to book a bunch of time,” but also wanted a place to unwind outside the studio. “We lived here for two months with the kids and the clothes.”

One of his studio innovations was an air-conditioning and filtration system that whooshes out smoke and neutralizes it with charcoal filters and blue lights that kill bacteria, because the official smoking policy is “whatever they want,” he said. On a recent afternoon, a strong scent of cannabis came from Studio A.

To create his rambling California oasis in the middle of a busy neighborhood, Brundo acquired house after house on the south side of his lot over the years so he could keep expanding. He bought and tore down 10 of them.

“Each house was a battle,” he said, particularly one where the owners had an issue with guitarist and outdoorsman Ted Nugent, who accidentally shot an arrow into their yard.

While the property could be used for other purposes, Buddy Brundo hopes to find a buyer who will keep the music going.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Brundo had set up a Styrofoam deer and a bear on the back of his property to entertain archer Nugent. The musician missed a shot and his arrow passed through the fence and came close to striking a neighbor in her backyard as her husband stood nearby.

“He was really pissed off,” Brundo said of his neighbor. It took Brundo another year to buy the neighbors’ house “because the price went up,” he said.

Today, the foliage a full-time groundskeeper tends has grown tall and thick. Sleek cats roam the grounds.

The parking lot is large for the studio’s size, and its 59 striped spaces have accommodated about $2 million worth of fancy cars at a time, Brundo estimated. It’s also big enough for basketball games, and Brundo recently painted a full court on the asphalt so singer The Weeknd could play ball during downtime.

While the property could be turned to other uses such as stores and housing, Brundo hopes to sell it to someone who will keep the music going even as times change.

The recent backlash against AI-generated music has prompted “a reversion back to the real” with bands using more instruments and needing more space to record, Mihalka said. “There are fewer studios now where you can actually do this.”

There is no love like municipal infrastructure love.

It was late in the 20th century when my wife, Mary Frances, and I moved into Los Feliz. Quickly we learned that our corner of the neighborhood was known as Franklin Hills, and that just about every eastward outing would take us across a funny little bridge with eight pointy turrets. That bridge was the Shakespeare Bridge.

As a teacher at nearby Ivanhoe Elementary, Mary Frances crossed the bridge twice every school day for more than 20 years. As a student there, our daughter Grace crossed it for six years, usually with me as chauffeur.

We’ve crossed it at all hours in every kind of weather, on foot, on bikes and in cars, talking about school, work, family and, lately, the fractured state of the nation and world.

Now that bridge on Franklin Avenue at St. George Street is near its 100th anniversary and an Oct. 10 neighborhood celebration is in the works, complete with a street party and procession. As the day approaches, I keep thinking about how large a funny little bridge can become in the lives of its neighbors.

This view looks westward across L.A.’s Franklin Avenue Bridge, also known as the Shakespeare Bridge.

(Library of Congress)

Originally it was the Franklin Avenue Bridge, designed by J.C. Wright of the city’s civil engineering department in the mid-1920s, when a twenty-something cartoonist named Walt Disney was new to the neighborhood and the Vitagraph Studios, a block away, were transitioning from silent films to talkies.

Paid for by a controversial city assessment of neighbors, the bridge is 262 feet long and 30 feet wide — a pipsqueak compared with landmarks like Pasadena’s Colorado Street Bridge or the 6th Street Bridge between Boyle Heights and downtown L.A.’s Arts District. Its three open-spandrel arches were made using Portland cement.

Nobody knows where the Shakespeare nickname came from, but city officials designated the bridge as L.A.’s Historic-Cultural Monument No. 126 in 1974 and retrofitted it in the 1990s to better withstand earthquakes. Crucially, city staffers preserved those charming and entirely unnecessary turrets, which deserve their own sonnet, if you ask me.

“Back then, people put some thought into these things,” City Council aide Tom LaBonge told this newspaper in 1988, years before he became councilman (2001-15) for the district that includes the bridge.

Since 2017, neighbors have tended a Shakespeare Bridge Garden beneath the span. The neighbors (a.k.a. the Franklin Hills Residents Assn.) also pay to keep up the landscaping on the nearby traffic island.

When the bridge went up, L.A. “was becoming a city,” said Alison Wallace, president of the FHRA. “We were trying to look legit, and people were adding all of these amazing public works.”

The result, Wallace said, was a span that eased connections between neighborhoods and “helped us become a community.”

This view looks from below the Franklin Avenue Bridge, also known as the Shakespeare Bridge.

(Library of Congress)

Many architectural sources call its style Gothic Revival. Some see Moorish influence. Researcher Tiger Shankman has hailed its “perky, anachronistic beauty.” In “An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles,” authors David Gebhard and Robert Winter suggest that the ornate ends of the bridge “cry out for sculptured saints.”

Instead of saints, however, the bridge has seen a lot of actors and film crews. The bridge turns up in the movies “Dead Again” (1991) and “I Love You, Man” (2009), the Netflix series “Nobody Wants This” (in 2025) and the HBO series “I Love L.A.” (also 2025). My favorite clip is a chase sequence from a 1971 “Mannix” episode — excruciatingly slow-paced by 2026 standards, and shot long before the FHRA tore out the city’s blacktop median and planted greenery.

Given all of its neighborhood fame, it surprised me to hear how few Angelenos know about the bridge. When Charlie Ryan and Thom Vest started offering LA Explained walking tours early this year, they expected the Disney history would be a popular part of their Los Feliz itinerary, but the bridge quickly emerged as another central element.

Because most of those who sign up for the Los Feliz tour live elsewhere, they have never crossed the bridge “and don’t know it’s there,” Ryan said. “Out of all the tours that I do, it’s the one that brings the most surprise to people.”

An aerial view of the Shakespeare Bridge, formally known as the Franklin Avenue Bridge, in the Franklin Hills area of Los Feliz.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

But plenty of those who live nearby have deep connections with the bridge, including Charley and Shirley Mims, who got married there on Oct. 21, 2000.

To open the ceremony, Shirley strolled from the west end of the bridge to the east, where Charley was waiting. (They still live in the neighborhood and plan to be at the centennial party.)

“When you see the bridge and cross it,” my neighbor Dave McDonald said the other day, “you feel like you’re home. It’s like a welcoming beacon.”

“It’s a real local’s way of getting around,” said Matteo Chizzola, who moved to Los Angeles four years ago and settled in Los Feliz two years ago. Last year, when Chizzola decided to start selling matcha from a sort of grown-up street-corner lemonade stand, he chose a patch of sidewalk at Franklin Avenue and Talmadge Street, two blocks from the bridge.

A jogger crosses the Shakespeare Bridge.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“It is beautiful and it’s weird. If you go at the right time of day, at sunset, it’s an incredible view,” he said.

Chizzola said he isn’t getting rich running the stand, Fridays through Sundays, but “it has become something that puts a huge smile on my face.”

He’ll be on hand for the bridge’s centennial parade, along with invited local luminaries including Victor the fruit guy (who worked a corner near Marshall High School for more than a decade) and Dora Herrera of the much-loved Yuca’s restaurant on Hillhurst Avenue.

A pedestrian crosses the Shakespeare Bridge,which was completed in 1926.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Sometimes, when Mary Frances and I are on a neighborhood walk, we stop mid-span. In the distance to the south, you see the downtown skyline. In the arroyo below the bridge (officially the Arroyo de Sacatela) you see the private homes and yards along Monon Street and Myra Avenue. You also see the Los Feliz campus of the International School of Los Angeles (1960), the only school designed by modernist architect John Lautner.

Then there are the decorations. Every few months, in a tradition started by departed neighbor Chris Boutelle, Mary Frances joins a team of FHRA board members and other volunteers who put up hearts for Valentine’s Day, shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day, Pride and Juneteenth flags in June, American flags and bunting in the lead-up to July 4, and so on.

Most of these costume changes are seamless. But in June 2023, someone tore down the Pride flags. Neighbors quickly replaced them. They came down again. Neighbors replaced them again. The back-and-forth went on for weeks. A suspect was arrested, released, then re-arrested.

Shakespeare Bridge in Los Feliz was the site of controversy in June 2023, when someone repeatedly stole Pride flags from a bridge display. Neighbors replaced the flags and police made an arrest.

(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

“It was almost every day for a month. People really came together,” said Wallace. The vandal surely didn’t mean to, but Wallace contends that he wound up uniting the neighborhood as never before.

The Oct. 10 bridge celebration, organized by the FHRA, will begin with a noon procession to the bridge from Marshall High School (another neighborhood Gothic Revival landmark), featuring a marching band, several vintage cars and a costumed dog parade.

At the end of that short walk, there’s a party planned from 1-5 p.m. at the end of Monon Street , right under the bridge. There will be snacks, drinks, live music, kid crafts, a bouncy house, a handful of actors in Shakespearean garb and scads of neighbors being neighborly.

I’ll be there for all of it. In times like these, every bridge needs celebrating.

Shakespeare Bridge, formally known as the Franklin Avenue Bridge, spans a ravine in the Franklin Hills with downtown Los Angeles in the background.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)