Rec Director on Waveny Caffeine & Carburetors: ‘It Went Very Well’

The first New Canaan gathering of classic and specialty auto enthusiasts to be held somewhere other than the downtown—the Oct. 19 event at Waveny—went “very well” and “people seemed to enjoy themselves,” the head of the Recreation Department said Wednesday night.

Caffeine & Carburetors’ debut at New Canaan’s treasured park saw cars “in a nice orderly manner on the roads, the parking lot, around the front circle of the house,” Steve Benko said at the regular meeting of the Park & Recreation Commission meeting, during the first public postmortem of the 3.5-hour event.

“I didn’t see any issues or problems,” he said at the meeting, held in the Douglass Room at Lapham Community Center. “Doug [Zumbach] and his crew stayed after to pick up signs and pick up garbage. He got a tremendous donation for the Food Pantry. Overall, I think it was a successful event. I think we had a nice crowd of people. I don’t have anything negative to say about it.”

Hosted six times between April and November in downtown New Canaan since its founding four years ago, Caffeine & Carburetors became too popular for police and volunteers to manage that often this season. The events founders, including Zumbach—owner of the eponymous gourmet coffee shop on Pine Street out of which Caffeine & Carburetors grew—and town officials this summer hammered out a vision where the event might be held less often and in some combination of the downtown and Waveny Park.

The October trial-run at Waveny saw 700 cars and about 2,500 people turn up, Zumbach said at Wednesday’s meeting.

The figures are about the usual number of cars, though attendees were somewhat less, he said.

Asked how well downtown merchants made out with the influx of auto enthusiasts coming to New Canaan, Zumbach said he was in the downtown twice in the afternoon hours following Caffeine & Carburetors, and that there were attendees there both times.

“Not the number we normally have if the event is held in town, but there were definitely cars,” he said.

Commission Chairman Sally Campbell said she thought the event was “wonderful” and that a subcommittee of the group may at a future meeting raise specific questions of Zumbach as he eyes a 2015 Caffeine & Carburetors schedule. “Like, What’s the effect on the merchants? How do you register the cars? How do you control it?” Campbell said.

“I think the more work we do ahead of time, the less questions the commission will have,” she added.

Zumbach said preliminary discussions with town leaders this year set forth a vision of four events total, split evenly between the downtown and Waveny, and that the permitting process for 2015 likely would start in January.

Commissioner Andrea Peterson said that after the Waveny event, she heard from park regulars who told her that those who normally visit on a Sunday “definitely felt they were precluded from entering the park on that Sunday.”

Zumbach responded: “That was never my intention, to preclude anyone from the park.”

Waveny was open as usual on the day of the Caffeine & Carburetors, with parking set aside for its 3.5-hour duration in areas such as the lot between the platform tennis courts and pool.

Parks Superintendent John Howe echoed much of what Benko relayed, saying, “We had no additional cleanup or anything. The place was perfect.”

Here’s a 10-slide gallery from the event: