Description of Historic Place

Located at the corner of 124 Street and 24 Avenue within the residential neighbourhood of Ocean Park, Crescent Park Annex is a small one-storey, one-room schoolhouse with a partial basement, a front-gabled entrance, corbelled red-brick chimney and ribbon windows. The school is situated on a large lot, and is surrounded by grassed open space and a number of trees and perimeter plantings.

Heritage Value

Crescent Park Annex, built in 1918, is significant as the earliest surviving school in the Ocean Park neighbourhood and as a demonstration of the value that was placed on public education at that time. Built on land donated by local pioneer Benjamin Stevenson, the one-room schoolhouse initially offered grades one through eight and had an enrollment of eight students. In 1948,when Crescent Park School was constructed nearby to accommodate the expanding community, Crescent Park Annex became a secondary teaching site for grade one. It continues to operate as a classroom and schoolyard for kindergarten students and remains a landmark in the neighbourhood.

The Annex is further valued for its association with the development of the Ocean Park neighbourhood in the early twentieth century. From its 1880s origins as a small community on the north shore of Semiahmoo Bay, the neighbourhood developed through subdivision, notably by W. Pascoe Goard, a Methodist Minister from Winnipeg. The western portion of Goard’s land was designated as park and named Ocean Park. Transportation improved in the area in 1913 with the advent of the Great Northern Railway Line, which ran from Vancouver to White Rock via New Westminster, with a station at Ocean Park. Residential development followed, and the school was built in 1918. By 1924, Stevenson Road was opened, permitting car travel from New Westminster to White Rock.

Crescent Park Annex is also valued as an example of architectural schoolhouse design. Starting in the 1880s, the provincial Public Works Department provided school districts with standardized building plans. The design of Crescent Park Annex is standard in its front-gabled rectangular plan. Typical of mandated school policy, the windows are banked along the east and west sides to allow abundant natural light, leaving sufficient wall space for large blackboards.

Source: City of Surrey Planning Department

Character-Defining Elements

Key elements that define the heritage character of the Crescent Park Annex include its:
- location adjacent to single family residential dwellings at the corner of 124 Street and 24 Avenue, set far back from the street
- continuous use as a school and location for community activities
- institutional form, scale and massing, as expressed by its one-storey height, partial basement, symmetrical rectangular plan and front-gabled roof
- wood-frame construction with original wooden siding covered by stucco and original cedar shingle roof
- masonry elements such as the internal red-brick chimney with corbelling
- windows, including original wood-frame banked symmetrical window openings and double-hung four-over-one wooden-sash windows with horns
- original interior features, such as wood trim
- associated landscape features, such as large grassed schoolyard in the rear and perimeter plantings