Suicide Site Too Popular Dead Rocker’s Wife Says She’s Tearing Down Carriage House

The carriage house where grunge star Kurt Cobain killed himself two years ago is being leveled, says his widow, Courtney Love.

“I’m knocking down the green-house where Kurt died because it’s become bigger than the Space Needle,” Love, lead singer of the band Hole, said recently.

Fans of Cobain and his band, Nirvana, make pilgrimages to the family home on Lake Washington, staring at the skylighted carriage house from tiny Viretta Park next door.

Benches at the park have become graffiti-filled monuments to Cobain. Some fans “take pieces of the trees,” Love said, explaining that she is hoping to regain security and privacy for herself and the couple’s daughter, Frances Bean.

“Some of them try to climb the fence. It’s like beer cans littered everywhere and icky debris. Who wants to walk their dog tripping over a syringe? This is my (neighborhood) park and I can’t bring my daughter into my park,” she told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Love said she pays $10,000 a month for guards and surveillance along the park border.

“I’m mainly worried for Frances Bean,” she said as she strolled with her daughter outside the property. “It’s intimidating. This park was relatively obscure. Then Kurt killed himself and now it’s a big deal.”

Love also is being drawn into a turf dispute involving the city, a group called Neighbors & Friends of Viretta Park, and another neighbor, Starbucks coffee founder Howard Schultz, over encroachments by property owners on the two-acre park above Lake Washington.

A recent King County Superior Court decision ordered Schultz to give back pieces of his property to the park, although he does not have to remove a driveway that runs through it to his house.

Love, who is restoring the 1901 mansion she and Cobain bought a few months before his death, said she has willingly returned eight to 10 feet with no complaints.

But she said the city and the Friends of the Park may be going too far in trying to restore the park’s original boundaries. The most recent survey brought the property line to within 8-1/2 feet of Love’s front porch. If that stands, she would be forced to cut into her house to accommodate her driveway.

Love said she’d like the city to grant her a few more feet in the front of her house.

“I’ve been a simp, to be honest. Now I’m tired of being nice about it.”