[3] Another sister, Lavinia Taylor Howe, was the wife of William Travers Jerome, the New York County District Attorney from 1902 to 1909.
[8] In 1888, Mayor Abram Hewitt appointed Howe to serve as a member of the Aqueduct Commission of the City of New York.
[4] After his death, his friend and former legislator Theodore Roosevelt (who had yet to become New York's Police Commissioner, Governor, or President) penned a tribute to Howe, writing:[9] "As a friend and former fellow-legislator of Walter Howe, I am unwilling to let his death pass without expressing in some public way my sense of what the city of New-York owes him.
Although a man keenly appreciative of artistic and literary work, and himself fond of using both pen and brush, the services by which he especially rendered the city his debtor were done in public life.
[18][19] Through his son Ernest, he was posthumously a grandfather of Walter Howe (1907–1966), who served as Speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives and President Eisenhower's Ambassador to Chile from 1958 to 1961, and Margaret Bruce Howe, the founder of the Prospect Press in Hartford who became the wife of Herbert L. Crapo, editor of the Litchfield Enquirer.