Rivers Cuomo House: The Weezer Garage That Was Demolished

There are two houses in the Rivers Cuomo story, and only one of them matters culturally. It is not where he lives. It was a rented house on Amherst Avenue in West Los Angeles, and its garage is where Weezer wrote, rehearsed, and recorded the songs that became their debut album. That garage is the one in “In the Garage” and the one in the “Say It Ain’t So” video.

It no longer exists. The house was demolished in July 2023 to make way for affordable housing. Cuomo himself lives in Santa Monica, a few miles west, in a home he has never made public and which this article will not attempt to pinpoint.

Here is what is actually known about both.

Who is Rivers Cuomo?

Rivers Cuomo is an American musician, born in New York in 1970 and raised partly on a meditation community in Connecticut. He moved to Los Angeles in 1989 to pursue music and formed Weezer in early 1992. The band’s self-titled debut, universally known as the Blue Album, was released in 1994 and has never really gone away.

He is also, unusually for a rock frontman, a Harvard graduate, having studied there in stretches between albums and completed his degree in 2006. He married Kyoko Ito the same year, and they have two children.

The Amherst house and its garage

Cuomo and the bassist Matt Sharp moved into a house on Amherst Avenue in West Los Angeles on 19 March 1992, which was also the date Weezer played its first show. The timing is almost too neat, and it is why the house occupies the place it does in the band’s history.

Various members lived there before the band formed and well after the first album came out. The garage is the important part: it is where the early material was written, rehearsed, and recorded, and it is directly referenced in the band’s own work. “In the Garage”, on the Blue Album, is about that room. The “Say It Ain’t So” video was shot at the house.

For a certain kind of listener, this is one of the significant addresses in 1990s American rock, comparable in fan terms to any recording studio. It was also, in ordinary planning terms, a modest rented house in West Los Angeles with no protection of any kind.

The demolition

Its demolition was announced in November 2020 and carried out in July 2023. The site was cleared for three affordable housing buildings totalling more than six hundred units, on a parcel next to a Metro station on the line running out to Santa Monica.

Fans documented the teardown as it happened, and the loss was felt genuinely, but it is worth being clear-eyed about what was traded. This was not a landmark building being replaced by a larger private house. It was an unremarkable rental property being replaced by several hundred homes for people who need them, next to public transport, in a city with an acute housing shortage.

The contrast with other Los Angeles demolitions covered on this site is instructive. When an architecturally significant house is removed to build a bigger private residence, as in the case documented in the account of Chris Pratt’s Brentwood project, the argument for preservation is strong.

Here, the building had cultural association rather than architectural merit, and what replaced it serves a public purpose. Reasonable people can regret the loss and still think the outcome was right.

Where does Rivers Cuomo live now?

Santa Monica, California.

This comes from Cuomo himself rather than from a database. He has posted publicly about being at home in Santa Monica, and he has been associated with the city for many years. Nothing in reliable reporting suggests he has moved.

Beyond the city, there is nothing documented. No purchase, no price, no listing, no square footage, and no interior photography of his home exists in any reliable source. He has never put a house on the market or given a house tour.

A note on the addresses you will find online

Search for Rivers Cuomo’s house and several people-search and data-broker sites will return a specific street address in Santa Monica, presented as fact.

This site will not republish that, for two reasons. The first is reliability: data brokers assemble records from marketing databases and public filings; they are frequently out of date, and they routinely attach addresses to the wrong person. Nothing on those pages is verified journalism. The second is that publishing a private residential address for a working musician with a large public following is not something a responsible site does, whatever its provenance.

The same principle applies throughout this site. City-level information that a person has made public themselves is reportable. A street address for a private home is not, and the fact that a scraper has published it does not change that.

What is actually worth knowing

The useful summary is short. The house that made Weezer was a rental on Amherst Avenue; its garage is on the record in the band’s own songs and videos, and it was demolished in July 2023 for several hundred units of affordable housing. Rivers Cuomo lives in Santa Monica and has kept his home entirely out of the public record.

That is a more interesting pair of facts than a photo gallery of a house he does not own. Los Angeles musicians who have stayed put and stayed private are not rare, though the documentation varies; compare the more visible property record of John Frusciante’s Los Angeles compound.

Sources

• Weezerpedia, the long-running fan-maintained reference on the band, for the Amherst house’s history, the date the members moved in, the garage’s role in the early recordings, and the November 2020 demolition announcement and July 2023 teardown.
• Yahoo Entertainment on the making of the Blue Album and the band’s early Los Angeles years.
• Wikipedia for his biography, education, and family.
• Rivers Cuomo’s own public posts identifying Santa Monica as his home.