A Main Street institution is closing up shop.

After 11 years, Tony Boffa, a household name throughout southern Maine, is shutting down his Main Street music school.

Boffa, who grew up in Portland and lives in Falmouth, arguably has his closest ties to Westbrook.

He credits longtime Westbrook music teacher Don Doane as the biggest influence in his career and the first person to give him a job out of college – music teacher at the old junior high school, which he can see out the window of his music school.

After teaching in Portland and Cape Elizabeth schools, Boffa decided it was in Westbrook where he should open the Tony Boffa School of Contemporary Music.

However, Boffa’s influence reaches far beyond the city limits – and beyond the state, as well. The same way he speaks about Doane’s role as a teacher, a mentor and an inspiration, his former students speak of him.

“Tony has been a huge influence on me,” said Jamie Bishop, 27, who started taking lessons with Boffa 15 years ago at Cape Elizabeth Middle School and later in Westbrook.

“He took me aside and was very encouraging. He told me if I kept practicing the way I had been, I’d be able to play professionally in a couple of years,” he said, and that’s exactly what happened.

Bishop is now working as a freelance bass player in New York City, but still keeps Boffa’s number in his cell phone.

Though through Bishop and others, Boffa’s influence will live on, up-and-coming musicians won’t have the opportunity of learning from the legend. Two years out of retirement from public school teaching, Boffa is as busy as ever with his two bands – the Tony Boffa Trio and the Tony Boffa Band – and he hasn’t been able to put as much time into the school as he’d hoped.

“If I were a younger man, this would be my prime business,” he said Monday.

Instead, he’s going to focus on making music, which, fortunately for his fans, isn’t something he can see an end to any time soon.

Boffa, 58, has been playing music since he was 13 years old. At a time when, he said, like many teenagers, he felt “skinny and ugly and insignificant,” it gave him an identity. He said his life changed at 16 years old, as a student at Cheverus High School in Portland, when he met Doane, who took an interest in him as a young musician.

“I knew the first time I met him he was a very, very talented individual and that he was going to be a fantastic musician,” Doane said.

Though Boffa didn’t have the greatest grades in high school, with Doane’s recommendation, he was accepted to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He earned his way through school by playing gigs on weekends in Conway, N.H., and teaching guitar at Bowdoin College.

After Boffa earned his degree in musical education in 1973, Doane offered him a job in Westbrook, but Boffa was more interested in partying and playing gigs at night, which made it hard for him to give his all to the students.

Still, Doane said, between Boffa’s honesty, his musical knowledge and his affinity for children, he saw the makings of a great teacher from Boffa even then.

But the time wasn’t right, and Boffa decided to join a traveling show band, instead, playing at hotels and dance halls for a few years before settling down in Connecticut. There, he worked as a freelance guitarist, first working the country club circuit and then as a staff musician at the Oakdale Summer Theater, where he got to play alongside bigname acts like Engelbert Humperdinck and Bobby Vinton.

Eventually, the time came for Boffa to marry his girlfriend, Karen, and the two decided to move back to Maine. He restarted his teaching career as the band director in Portland schools, and, this time, it stuck. After nine years in Portland, he was hired in Cape Elizabeth, where he taught for more than a decade. He eventually returned to Westbrook schools.

At the same time he began teaching in the city again, he decided to open his own school, along with longtime friends and fellow musicians Jim Macisso and Tony Infantine, to spread a different take on teaching music.

“The philosophy here was not to just teach private lessons, but to break down the walls between rock, pop and jazz styles and traditionally trained musicians,” he said.

According to Boffa, most guitar students weren’t learning how to read music – a tool he believes is vital for any complete musician. At his school, not only did Boffa make sure the students were learning different aspects of being in a band, like writing and arranging music, he also grouped them together into ensembles, which was unique for a music school to do.

Bishop said it paid off when he, too, entered Berklee College of Music, and was able to test out of a lot of his classes, because of what he had already learned from Boffa.

However, without the time or energy left to oversee the school, Boffa is calling it quits. He said that by the start of the new year, whether the building is sold or not, there won’t be any more music lessons on Main Street.

“It’s going to be a huge loss to the community,” said Vickie Brogan, who’s been the office manager at the music school for the past 10 years.

For those who know what a difference Boffa has made in young musicians’ lives, it’s sad to see the school go, but they say, too, they understand Boffa’s reasoning.

“I did reach a point where it was too much,” Boffa said about the many hats he’s worn over the years. “I didn’t have the energy to keep all these balls in the air.”

Boffa, however, will still be a presence in the city at his weekly Thursday night gig at The Frog and Turtle on Bridge Street.

Though he won’t be taking on any new students, he’ll continue to reap the benefits of having been a teacher by watching the thousands of young musicians who have come through his school succeed.

“We did something nobody else has been able to do,” Boffa said about his school. “It’s been a nice ride.”

Long time area musician and music instructor, Tony Boffa, is trying to sell his building at 776 Main St. in Westbrook so he can concentrate on playing more music.