Cotati Crawl Thursday Nights and Downtown Changes
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
The bar scene has changed hands, but the Thursday Crawl is still happening. Ask a regular at Spancky's who owns the place these days, and you'll get a pause before an answer. Since January, three of the handful of bars on Cotati's two-block downtown stretch have new names on the paperwork, even where the sign out front hasn't changed. Meanwhile, last weekend, La Plaza Park wrapped its 35th consecutive Accordion Festival exactly the way it has every August since 1991.
Start with the 8 Ball Tavern. The nearly 90-year-old neighborhood bar at 8 Charles Street held a soft opening on February 28 under a new all-female ownership team: Julie LaMalfa Black, who spent eight years tending bar there before buying in, along with Jenafer Keys and Audrey De Vere Hunt. They've said they don't plan to touch the low ceilings or the irregular doorways that give the place its character, but they are adding Monday karaoke, Tuesday open mic nights, and food trucks from Thursday through Saturday.
A few doors down, Spancky's changed hands in January when longtime owner Kevin Gingher sold to Cheryl Cruz and her husband, Bill Katsaros, who now manages the bar. The building's history goes back further than the sale suggests. It started as the Cotati House in 1911, a stopover inn for travelers before Highway 101 rerouted around the town. Over the decades it became a roadhouse that hosted Van Morrison, Neil Young, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, and Arlo Guthrie. Katsaros has kept at least one family tradition going: on St. Patrick's Day, the bar served corned beef and cabbage on the house, a nod to a ritual from his father's old Trophy Room.
And in early January, brothers Omar and Ivan Galvan opened Galvan's Beer Garden as their first brick-and-mortar location, after years running Galvan's Eatery, a trio of red food trucks on the county's food-truck circuit. Their parents, Martin and Teresa, own Martin's Market and Martin's Taqueria in Windsor, and the beer garden has already settled into a game-day identity with communal picnic tables, big screens, and a menu built around quesabirria and carne asada fries.
That's three storefronts under three new ownership groups in about six weeks, on a strip that's only a few blocks long to begin with. It's not the first time the cast has changed. Friar Tuck's and the Cotati Yacht Club, both once fixtures of the same stretch, are now closed. The current wave of new owners has talked openly about wanting to bring back the traditions those bars used to anchor.
Here's the part that outlasts every ownership change: the Thursday night Cotati Crawl. It used to run four bars deep. Now it runs three, Spancky's, the 8 Ball, and the Tradewinds, and it still fills Old Redwood Highway with Sonoma State students working their way down the strip on the one night the whole town rearranges itself around a college ritual that predates most of the current owners by decades.
The reason the Crawl survives every changeover isn't sentiment. It's geography and math. Sonoma State's campus sits two miles away in Rohnert Park, a city that, as longtime residents like to point out, was built without a downtown of its own. Cotati's two blocks became the default by elimination. That means whoever owns these bars inherits a customer base that renews itself every four years as new students arrive and graduating ones leave, which is exactly why new owners keep betting on the same handful of buildings regardless of what happened to the last owner. The building doesn't need to be exceptional. It just needs to be standing on the right two blocks on a Thursday.
Tradewinds owner Chase Myers, who has watched the Crawl evolve over multiple ownership cycles at the bars around him, has described the tradition as calmer than it used to be but still carrying "the same atmosphere and the same vibe" from one generation of students to the next. The bars change. The crowd renews. The Thursday itself doesn't move.
Here's what's actually different under each new roof this year, and what stayed put regardless of who bought in:
Two blocks from all of this ownership turnover, La Plaza Park just finished hosting its 35th annual Accordion Festival on August 15 and 16, and nothing about the weekend depended on who happened to be pouring drinks nearby. The festival started in 1991 after accordionist and bandleader Jim Boggio and his friend Clifton "Buck" Kauffman turned a bar conversation about one of Boggio's albums into what's become one of the largest accordion festivals in the country. This year's edition filled seven stages with more than 40 acts spanning zydeco, polka, musette, Tex-Mex and classical, plus the jam tent and the Lady of Spain parade that have become as much a part of the tradition as the music itself. It's a nonprofit event, and the proceeds go back into local school music programs, which is its own kind of continuity: the festival doesn't just repeat, it reinvests in the town that hosts it.
La Plaza Park carries a second steady rhythm through the warmer months too. The Cotati Community Farmers Market sets up there every Wednesday afternoon from June through September, with live music and children's activities alongside the produce stands. Between the market's Wednesday cadence and the festival's fixed August weekend, the park runs on a calendar that has nothing to do with whoever currently holds a liquor license two blocks away.
The useful distinction here isn't between old Cotati and new Cotati. It's between the businesses that occupy the buildings and the rituals that occupy the calendar. Storefronts change hands because leases expire, owners retire, and new operators see an opening. Rituals like the Thursday Crawl, the August festival, and the Wednesday market survive that churn because they were never tied to a single owner's business plan in the first place. They're tied to a park, a night of the week, and a customer base that keeps showing up on its own schedule.
If you live here, that's the part worth tracking. Not who bought Spancky's this year, but whether the Thursday Crawl still fills the same three bars next Thursday. Not which new food truck rotation the 8 Ball is running, but whether La Plaza Park still hosts the market on Wednesday and the accordions in August. Those are the fixed points. Everything else is just this year's cast.
For more on what makes daily life in this stretch of Sonoma County distinct, Cotati's neighborhood page has additional context on the area, and our broader coverage of the region lives on our neighborhoods and resources pages.
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