Jimi's boyhood home is inarguably much more important to Seattle history than was the house in which Kurt Cobain barely lived. And Seattle didn't want that either (much to Cross's dismay).

Gee, maybe as you so often point out Seattle should spend such funds on things like low income housing and not another park in the richest part of town because Cobain shot himself there. And then tear down the house itself, which is the connection to Cobain? Charles's lack of pragmatism on full display here.

I never fail to pass by pictures or artwork of dead rock stars.

Aberdeen's the town that needs a Cobain Cenotaph.

@1 I think that's also the key difference between Cobain's Seattle house and, say, Graceland. The latter was an integral part of Presley's life (both public and private) for two decades. It's one of those places about which we say "If only those walls could talk!" But did anything truly memorable -- anything at all -- ever happen at Cobain House other than, sadly, his death? The house just isn't something that comes readily to mind when one thinks of him, and thus it has little if any significance for most Seattleites. But I agree with Charles that much of Seattle's musical legacy (especially the contributions by musicians of color) has in general been poorly conserved.

Charles lamenting that Seattle failed to spend over $7 million on a 1/2 acre parcel situated with 100 yards of two existing city parks is peak Stranger.

"Our grunge dead have almost no shrines, memorials, Meccas. Why?"

Because building shrines would be antithetical to grunge. I stood in MoPop many years ago looking at Kurt's thrift-store cardigan in a glass case; the whole thing was like some sort of reliquary. It was fascinating, and I think Kurt would have been appalled, or at the very least bewildered that he was Saint Cobain of the depressed and dispossessed, with his once 4-dollar purchase accessible only with paid admission.

Chris Cornell is on the side of Easy Street Records. He adorns a utility box in West Seattle as well. So does Kurt. That seems appropriate.

As does the the bench, the most perfect memorial one could imagine. His house? He lived there for just a few years. Maybe we should put a blue plaque at the Marco Polo Motel though.

PS: Thank you for acknowledging the lockdowns weren't long enough. More journalists need the guts and insight to say that.

Hey K.C, K.C
Won't you smile at me?
Sanna, hosanna, hey superstar

Oh, Chuck, who would laugh more at the idea of the city spending millions to buy a waterfront home -- and demolish it, than Kurt himself?

Nirvana is hugely overrated, an amplified rehash of 60's/70's garage punk, loud and soft based on basic pop song structure. Surfer Rosa came out several years before and go back further, Iggy, MC5, the Sonics, The Seeds kicked the door down decades earlier. Grunge is nothing but a movement brought on by (drumroll), corporate heads at record labels manufacturing rock to the masses. Money. Capitalism. In reality, music had already progressed to trip-hop and various offshoots of electronica with the advent of computers, even Madonna knew this with "Erotica" influenced by Massive Attack and the Bristol sound. The real rock pioneer of the 90's is Kevin Shields who managed to reinvent rock with "Loveless" a glorious masterpiece of chaotic backwards and forwards feedback and vocals. Kurt Cobain is a tragedy and his suicide should not be glorified.

Also, it's starchitech and not stararchitecht. I know many architects and none of them ever use that term.

Expanding on @6, MoPop actually has multiple Cobain sweaters in its collection, in addition to other clothing items, guitars, set lists, etc. I guess Charles missed that section of the museum?

Can Seattle grunge be considered musically innovative? Probably not. Was it exploited commercially to a cringe-inducing degree? Oh god yes. But it's still significant because it caught the mainstream zeitgeist like few local music scenes have ever done (Memphis in the '50s and Detroit, L.A. and San Francisco in the '60s are perhaps the only ones that surpass it in this regard). Grunge resonated widely with young people who were just then, in the midst of the early '90s recession, coming to the realization that the postwar boom was really and truly over, that the era of plentiful well-paying jobs anyone could do was probably gone for good, and that making a life as an adult would be much harder for them than it had been (or seemed to have been) for their parents' generation. It was Gen X's collective primal scream, and that's what makes it culturally important and its leading figures worth memorializing.

I'm not against creating a park honoring Cobain similar to the one (rightly) honoring Jimi Hendrix. I just don't think that a house he barely lived in and never created any widely shared memories in (except for one that nobody should celebrate) represents a particularly lamentable missed opportunity to do this.

@9 You must be real fun at parties.

Just rename Vireta Park. The Denny's have no shortage of things named after them.

Oops, that should be Viretta, not Vireta.

Mrs. Vel-DuRay regrets the error.

Toots must be some of the happiest sounds in our spherical corner of the universe, sweet contrast with the somber CK.

From the comments so far, seems you’re as under-appreciated as other Portland public figures, some coincident, and I can see why you’d propose that’s Portland’s most enduring trait: under-appreciation.

Were used to myth-making in Chicago, but Portland’s wind doesn’t seem to blow as hard.

@11: "It was Gen X's collective primal scream, and that's what makes it culturally important and its leading figures worth memorializing."

Agreed. It was also the last spasm of true Rock'n'Roll, a musical movement which would last seventy (!) years and revitalize the world, as the Blues, Jazz, and R&B had done before, and Rap/Hip Hop would do then and after.

I moved to Seattle just ahead of "Nevermind," and after it dropped, I recall DJ Jon Ballard on KISW-FM, telling us kids that Nirvana was nothing new, and then playing "The Witch," by The Sonics to prove it. I could not believe how well that song connected the Beatles to Nirvana. That was my introduction to the Pacific NW's long musical history, which the EMP would later memorialize in their "NW Passage" exhibit.

"But it's still significant because it caught the mainstream zeitgeist like few local music scenes have ever done (Memphis in the '50s and Detroit, L.A. and San Francisco in the '60s are perhaps the only ones that surpass it in this regard)."

The Seattle Music Scene was a moment which defined and began the international phenomenon which became Seattle In The '90s. To your list, I would add New York City in the '40s and '50s, Chicago in the '20s, New Orleans in the 20th Century, and then continue with the dot-com boom, echoing the rise of telephone and radio in the 1920s. We'd won the Cold War (as proof, a block of the Berlin Wall was on display at Seattle Center), it was an incredible, revolutionary time, and we who lived and made it can always look back upon it with pride and wonder.