Its architecture has some unusual features: above the front entrance is one of the few statues of the Crucifixion on the exterior of an American Catholic church; and inside, the Stations of the Cross depict Christ with oil paintings instead of statuary or carvings.

It has two engaged octagonal towers flanking the large rose window, with stone tracery forming conjoined trefoils, in the center of the upper stage.

On the north and south the bays are divided by buttresses supporting the steeply pitched copper roof[1] Inside, the entire nave is finished in the exterior limestone.

A high brownstone stoop with cast iron newels and rails leads from the street to a deeply recessed, arched first floor entrance with clustered colonnettes.

The Society building and school date to 1930 and 1948 respectively and are not considered sufficiently historic to be included in the National Register listing with the church and priory at this time.

[1] In the 1860s, a Dominican priest from France, Father Thomas Martin, was sent to the Diocese of New York and took up residence in a brownstone on Lexington Avenue and 62nd Street.

John McCloskey, the archbishop of the Diocese of New York and the first American cardinal, asked them to establish a parish on what is now the Upper East Side.

Father Martin and the other priests borrowed $10,000 ($218,000 in contemporary dollars[10]), bought 18 lots totaling 45,000 square feet (4,200 m2) at the present location[1] and began to construct a chapel on the northeast corner of 65th Street.

It commissioned William Schickel, a German-born architect who had recently completed his first major work in New York, the John Crimmins House at 40 East 68th Street.

The priory's intricate use of materials and its overall polychromy, characteristics of the High Victorian Gothic style popular in the late 19th century, reflect Schickel's training in Bavaria and the strong influence there of Friedrich von Gärtner.

He also decided that, reflecting the Dominican Order's Spanish origins, the representations of Christ at each of the Stations of the Cross would be oil paintings rather than the statuary or carvings more commonly used in American Catholic churches.

The images were painted by Telford and Ethel Paullin in imitation of styles from different countries and eras, which accounts for the changing color of Christ's robe between them.

A former stream that passed under the site, as well as the construction of the IRT Lexington Avenue Line subway tunnels, made it impossible to lay a sufficient foundation.

During the late 1960s and 1970s Andy Warhol, a devout Byzantine Catholic who lived nearby, attended Mass regularly at St. Vincent Ferrer.

Father Sam Matarazzo, the priest at the time, remembers him sitting quietly in the back of the church, taking neither communion nor confession.

He speculated that Warhol, one of many gay men who attended services at St. Vincent Ferrer despite Matarazzo's regular preaching of Catholic doctrine opposing homosexuality, was perhaps afraid of being recognized.

"[12] Later in the 20th century, contributions from William E. Simon and an anonymous donor allowed the church to purchase the newer of its two Schantz pipe organs.

[16] The funeral Mass of politician Geraldine Ferraro took place on March 31, 2011; she and her husband John Zaccaro had been married at the church in 1960.