By this morning, La Plaza Park had already forgotten it hosted seven stages and forty-some accordion acts over the weekend. The banners come down fast. The vendor booths that lined the hexagon's edges on Saturday and Sunday were gone before most people finished their coffee, and the grass underneath them is already springing back. If you walked through the plaza today, one day after the 35th Cotati Accordion Festival wrapped its final set, you would find nothing louder than a dog walker and the usual creak of the swings.
That quiet is the point. The festival is the postcard version of Cotati, the two days a year the town shows up in national accordion press and Bay Area news roundups. But the postcard is not the town. The actual texture of living here runs on a completely different clock, one that has nothing to do with a weekend headline act and everything to do with a Wednesday evening market stall, a Thursday night set at a cafe with a floor made from a defunct racetrack, and a short stretch of Old Redwood Highway that fills up with Sonoma State students on a random Tuesday. If you live in Cotati, you already know this. The festival is what outsiders think Cotati is. The rest of the calendar is what Cotati actually does.
The Festival's Real Ledger
Even the accordion festival's own numbers tell a smaller, steadier story than the "largest event of its kind" framing suggests. Since organizers Jim Boggio and Clifton "Buck" Kauffman launched the nonprofit event in 1991, it has donated more than $500,000 to youth music education and local school programs. Spread that across 35 years and it works out to something like $14,000 a year, not a windfall so much as a habit, the kind of unglamorous recurring gift that keeps a school music program's lights on rather than funding a single splashy grant.
That's consistent with how the festival treats its own legacy. Boggio, whose statue now stands in the plaza he helped fill with music, died in 1996, and the scholarship that carries his name today, along with that of accordionist Dick Contino's wife Judy, exists specifically to fund the next generation of players rather than to memorialize the last one. Contino himself played the festival's main stage 25 times, some of them into his eighties, before his death in 2017. The through-line isn't spectacle. It's succession, one accordion teacher's scholarship fund at a time.
The Rhythm Nobody Photographs
The festival photographs well. What doesn't get photographed is the weekly market that turns the same plaza into something closer to a neighborhood living room for four months every summer. From June through September, La Plaza Park hosts a certified farmers market on Wednesday evenings, with live entertainment on a small stage, kids' activities that have included pony rides and a bounce house in past seasons, and the kind of foot traffic that has nothing to do with tourism. People walk over, buy produce, sit on the grass, and go home. There's no ticket, no lineup announcement, no out-of-town accordion enthusiasts driving in from three states away. It just happens, week after week, and it's the version of the plaza that most residents actually use most often.
That's the pattern worth noticing. The festival draws people in. The market keeps them there. One is an event you plan a weekend around. The other is a habit you build a summer around.
Redwood Cafe Outlasts Every Headline
A few blocks from the plaza, Redwood Cafe has been serving breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner for nearly 30 years, open seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., with live music most Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. Do the arithmetic on that schedule and you land somewhere close to 150 nights of live music a year, every year, for three decades. Compare that to the accordion festival's two days, and the math on which venue actually shapes daily life in Cotati stops being close.
The cafe's history makes the contrast sharper. Its floor was built from lumber salvaged from the old Cotati Speedway, a 1.25-mile wooden racetrack that opened on East Cotati Avenue in 1921 with all 10,000 seats filled for its first race, and folded within two years after rain and traffic problems sank it. The wood that once carried race cars now carries dinner trays and open mic nights. That's a very Cotati kind of continuity: a big, short-lived spectacle gets absorbed into something smaller and more durable. The speedway lasted two years. The cafe built from its bones has lasted fifteen times that.
Why the Hexagon Matters
None of this works without the plaza's odd shape. La Plaza Park was laid out in the 1890s as a hexagon, not the standard grid, and Cotati remains one of only two towns in the country built this way, the other being a neighborhood in Detroit. That geometry is not just a trivia answer for the town's own tourism page. A hexagonal commons with streets radiating outward gives a small park more usable perimeter and more sightlines than a square plaza of the same size, which is part of why the same patch of grass can host a farmers market on a Wednesday, a movie night in another season, the Cotati Music Festival in June, Oktoberfest in the fall, a holiday tree lighting in December, and an accordion festival with seven stages in August, all without any one event feeling like it's swallowing the whole town.
The plaza isn't multipurpose because Cotati is small. It's multipurpose because someone in the 1890s drew it as a hexagon instead of a square, and 130-some years later the shape still does the work of making room for everything the town wants to do with it.
Restaurant Row, Not Festival Row
Walk Old Redwood Highway between Highway 116 and Valparaiso Avenue on almost any weekend night and the crowd isn't accordion tourists. It's Sonoma State students and regulars filling a short stretch of restaurants that covers more cuisines than the block length suggests:
- Superburger, for the classic American order
- Mi Ranchito, for Mexican food
- Tiny Thai, for Thai
- Mai Vietnamese, for Vietnamese
That variety in a two-square-mile town says something the festival's national write-ups don't capture. Cotati's dining scene isn't built around a once-a-year influx of visitors who need feeding for a weekend. It's built around a small resident and student population that wants real options on a Tuesday, and has had them for years.
What the Festival Actually Proves
None of this is an argument against the accordion festival. It's the town's most famous export, it has funded youth music for 35 years, and it deserves the write-ups it gets. But if you live here, the festival isn't the evidence of what Cotati is. It's the loudest two days in a year built mostly out of quiet, recurring ones: a market that shows up every summer week without a ticket booth, a cafe that has hosted live music longer than most festivals have existed, and a plaza shaped in the 1890s specifically so it could keep doing this, over and over, long after the banners come down.
That's the version of Cotati worth knowing, whether you're settling in for another ordinary Wednesday or just noticing, the way we did this morning, how fast the grass grows back.
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