Handcar regatta to morph into larger arts festival

<p>Santa Rosa's beloved Handcar Regatta officially ended after last September's fourth annual event, which drew 12,000 fans, many of them in old-fashioned costumes, to the city's Railroad Square District.</p><p>But on Wednesday, regatta co-founder Ty Jones announced a new but similar event, with a new name, for next summer. No site has been selected yet for Dr. Erasmus P. Kitty's Kinetic Frenetic Opera of Mechanical Mayhem.</p><p>Like its predecessor, the new festival will feature rail races between artistic contraptions created for the event, as well as music, films and live performance, Jones said in a statement.</p><p>“It's going to be similar only in that it's a railcar race,” Jones said of the new event. “I wanted to expand the event ... into a larger arts festival.”</p><p>Within the next six weeks, organizers need to decide on the new event's locale, Jones said. The main requirement is an available stretch of railroad track somewhere in Sonoma County.</p><p>“I don't anticipate a problem finding a location,” Jones said. “My first preference would be Santa Rosa, but both Healdsburg and Windsor have expressed interest.”</p><p>Last fall's Handcar Regatta was called possibly the last ever, after the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit district told regatta organizers that SMART expected to close the tracks at Railroad Square for new construction.</p><p>At that point, Jones and regatta co-founder Spring Maxfield dissolved their partnership, with Maxfield moving on to other projects. Jones' ART101 design company is producing the new festival, but Jones is carrying over the nostalgic style of the regatta, while moving the setting to a slightly later era.</p><p>That includes the use of the name Dr. Erasmus P. Kitty, a fictional 19th-century inventor, engineer and dentist previously used to promote the Handcar Regatta. The character was created by Jones's partner, Kernan Coleman.</p><p>“This is Dr. Kitty 30 years later, sort of circa 1920,” Jones said.</p><p>The new event's wordy name also echoes the old-time flavor of the previous festival, for which the full name was The Great West End and Railroad Square Handcar Regatta and Exposition of Mechanical and Artistic Wonders.</p><p>Jones said he plans to meet with officials from SMART, Sonoma County and the City of Santa Rosa during the next few weeks to discuss possible locations for the new event.</p><p>Farhad Mansourian, SMART's executive director, said last September that the district would work with Jones to find a new location for a railcar festival. Mansourian couldn't be reached Wednesday for comment.</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. See his ARTS blog at http://arts.blogs.pressdemocrat.com.</p>