Peter Latham House at 239 Fourth Street, New Westminster

The Peter Latham House at 239 Fourth Street is one of Queen's Park's oldest surviving homes, although even its birthday has become a small archival argument. Different City and heritage studies have dated the house to 1888, around 1890 and 1893.

Historic directories point to dentist Dr. Charles Edward C. Brown as the original owner. By 1901, Peter and Elizabeth Latham and their five children were living here, which is where the house picks up the name now used in City heritage research.

Latham was not simply a gardener who happened to live near Queen's Park. In 1890, New Westminster City Council hired him as the park's first landscape gardener and park ranger. He had previously worked on the grounds of Ontario's government house and legislative buildings, then arrived in New Westminster just as Queen's Park was being transformed from roughly cleared ground into something recognizably civic.

A City history records what that meant in practical terms. In 1892, Latham established a nursery in the park using plants shipped from France after a four-week sea voyage: purple beeches, horse chestnuts, English and Irish yew, rhododendrons, maples, birches and a small catalogue of other imported ambitions. Some of the landscape he helped establish can still be traced in Queen's Park.

His own house has had a rougher century.

Behind the stucco is original wood siding. The cross-gabled form, wraparound verandah, old window sashes and trim survived, along with stained and art-glass details added around the beginning of the twentieth century. The verandah was eventually enclosed. Windows broke. Water and time went to work.

This photograph caught the house at an interesting point in that decline. Queen's Park had become a formal Heritage Conservation Area less than a year earlier. A City assessment completed later in 2018 identified 239 Fourth Street as the Peter Latham House and gave it considerable heritage value, while also warning that its derelict condition was already making restoration less practical. A 2019 feasibility study went as far as examining whether the house could be lifted, given a new basement and foundation, and rehabilitated around it.

The problem did not go away.

By 2026, structural engineers were reporting settlement, deteriorated structural components, an inadequate foundation and no code-compliant lateral-force system. A demolition application followed. The City refused it, concluding that enough heritage value and restoration potential remained to require the house to stay. It was subsequently offered for sale "as-is, where-is", a protected historic house requiring the sort of reconstruction that makes the word protected considerably easier to write than to finance.

Across Queen's Park, traces of Latham's planting still survive.

At 239 Fourth Street, so does the old front door.