Cotati's Accordion Festival Turns 35. Its Downtown Just Turned Over.

For as long as most people in Rohnert Park and Cotati can remember, the middle weekend of August has meant one thing: accordions, all day, filling La Plaza Park. This year the tradition holds, and it's even a little bigger than usual for its 35th run. What's changed is the strip of Old Redwood Highway wrapped around that park. Walk it this month and you'll notice something the festival posters don't mention: most of the names on the doors are new.

That's worth more than a passing mention. It's the more interesting story this August, and it says something about how a town this size keeps its character while nearly everything on its main strip changes hands in the same six months.

The Festival That Hasn't Changed Much in 35 Years

The Cotati Accordion Festival returns to La Plaza Park on August 15 and 16, running from roughly 9:45 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and 9:35 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday. It started in 1991, the work of local musician Jim Boggio and his co-organizer Clifton "Buck" Kauffman, who wanted a way to raise money for school music programs while giving the accordion a stage it rarely got elsewhere. Boggio died in 1996. A statue of him now stands in the plaza where the festival he started still runs every summer.

The scholarship side of that mission has outlasted him too. Accordion virtuoso Dick Contino played the festival's main stage 25 times into his eighties before his death in 2017, and the event now funds the Dick and Judy Contino Accordion Scholarship in his name. Over its history, the festival has put more than half a million dollars into youth music education and local community organizations.

This year's lineup leans international: Grammy-nominated Cory Pesaturo, Belarusian-born accordionist Stas Venglevski, Spain's Marta Cubas Hondal, Slovakia's Julia Masnicova, along with Royal Jelly Jive and Those Darn Accordions. As Patch put it in its writeup this month, "if you've never imagined planning a weekend around an accordion, you've probably never been to Cotati." That's the pitch, and thirty-five years in, it still works.

The Strip That Has

While the festival's story stayed remarkably stable, the businesses around it did not sit still this year. The Press Democrat reported in March that Cotati's downtown was in the middle of a genuine ownership shuffle, with several longtime establishments changing hands within weeks of each other.

The 8 Ball, a tavern that's been pouring drinks since 1937, held a soft opening under new ownership on February 28, 2026. The new owners are an all-female management team who say they want to bring back popular community events while keeping the bar's look and feel intact rather than remodeling it into something else.

A few doors down, Spancky's changed hands too. Owner Kevin Gingher sold the bar in January to Cheryl Cruz and her husband and manager Bill Katsaros. The building's history runs deep even by Cotati standards. It opened in 1911 as the Cotati House, a stopover inn for travelers on what later became Highway 101. When the highway rerouted around town, the building was reworked and renamed several times, including a stretch as Sophie's, before settling into its current identity. Along the way it hosted Van Morrison, Neil Young, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, and Arlo Guthrie, and it's remained a fixture on the local bar crawl known as the Cotati Crawl.

Two ownership changes on one short strip in the same quarter is not routine turnover. It's a signal that people who already know this town are the ones buying into it.

What Filled the Gaps

Not every change downtown is a legacy business finding a new owner. Some of it is new formats arriving for the first time. The Nightingale is moving into the former Flagship Taproom space at 8099 La Plaza, near Mezzeluna, and the city's community development director, Noah Housh, told the Press Democrat that Cotati received building permit applications for a full renovation and requested an expedited review. Housh also noted a detail that explains why change moves fast here: Cotati doesn't require planning approvals for restaurants that serve alcohol, which shortens the runway between a lease signing and an opening night.

A short walk away, a third location of Ayawaska, a Peruvian restaurant with existing spots in Petaluma and Novato, is coming to 8201 Old Redwood Highway. The city has approved the initial permit, though the operator told the paper some details are still being worked out.

Neither of these is replacing something that closed. They're filling formats Cotati didn't have much of before: a dedicated live music room and a full-service Peruvian kitchen. That's expansion, not substitution, and it's happening at the same time longtime bars are staying open under new names on the deed but the same names on the sign.

Two Versions of the Same Six Blocks

It helps to see the contrast side by side. Cotati runs on two very different rhythms, and this year both are worth paying attention to.

Cotati's population sits around 7,275 people, according to Sonoma County Tourism, which makes it a genuinely small town hosting what organizers describe as one of the largest events of its kind in California. That gap between the size of the town and the size of the weekend is part of why the festival matters so much to the businesses around it. A crowd that large, arriving once a year, is a real test of whether a downtown can hold its footing. This year it's being tested with a lineup of business owners who mostly weren't there twelve months ago.

The Wednesday You'd Miss If You Only Came in August

The Cotati Community Farmers' Market has been running every Wednesday from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. since early June and continues into late September, set up in the same La Plaza Park that hosts the accordion crowd. It's smaller and local by design: farm-fresh produce, flowers, specialty foods, and handcrafted goods, with live music every week and beer and wine available through the Cotati Chamber of Commerce. It also accepts CalFresh Market Match, which matches shoppers' benefits dollar for dollar up to a daily cap, a detail that says something about who this market is actually built to serve.

If the accordion festival is the weekend Cotati performs for the rest of the county, the Wednesday market is the version of downtown that exists for the people who live here the other 51 weeks of the year. Both use the same six-block radius. Neither one is the whole story without the other.

Why the Overlap Is the Real Story

Put the pieces together and a pattern shows up that a quick scan of festival dates or restaurant openings won't reveal on its own. The businesses changing hands this year, the 8 Ball and Spancky's, are staying almost exactly what they were, just under new ownership committed to keeping the character rather than flipping it. The businesses opening for the first time, The Nightingale and Ayawaska, are adding formats the town hadn't had rather than competing head to head with what's already there. And all of it is landing in the same season as a 35-year-old festival that hasn't changed its mission since Jim Boggio and Buck Kauffman started it to fund school music programs.

That's a town renewing itself from the inside rather than being renewed by outside investment. It's a distinction that matters if you've ever watched a small downtown lose its identity to a wave of turnover that swaps local character for something generic. Cotati's version of turnover this year looks like people who already understood the place deciding to buy into it more deeply. The hexagonal street grid that makes this one of only two towns in the country laid out that way, the other being Detroit, has stayed the same since the 1890s. This year, the ownership underneath it is what's catching up to match.

A Note From Rhonda

I've spent a long time watching Sonoma County towns handle growth, and most of them handle it by adding something new on top of what was already there. Cotati is doing it differently this year, and it's worth noticing if you live here or you're thinking about it. A town that can turn over its ownership without losing its character is a town with real staying power, and that shows up in how people feel about their neighborhoods long before it shows up in any market report.

If you're curious what that kind of staying power means for your own home's value, or you just want to talk through what's happening in Rohnert Park and Cotati over coffee, I'm always glad to help. Request Your Complimentary Home Valuation whenever you're ready, no pressure attached.