[3][5][6] Both the church and parish house are part of the Greenwich Village Historic District, designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1969.

[2][7]: 145–146 The Church of the Ascension was first organized in 1827,[8] and their first church – located on the north side of Canal Street east of Broadway[4] – was one of the early Greek Revival buildings in the city, designed by the city's first professional architectural firm, Town & Thompson, the partnership of Ithiel Town and Martin Euclid Thompson.

[4] Not long after the church opened, on June 26, 1844, United States President John Tyler married Julia Gardiner.

[10] Since Gardiner was much younger than Tyler, John Quincy Adams called the couple the "laughing-stock of the city.

[2]: 55 Stanford White's interior design was "one of the great collaborative efforts of the era", and features a pulpit designed by Charles Follen McKim; mosaics by D. Maitland Armstrong; a marble reredos by Louis Saint-Gaudens, the brother of Augustus Saint-Gaudens; several stained glass windows by John LaFarge and his altar mural The Ascension, a 30-foot (9.1 m) by 35-foot (11 m) piece[8] considered to be one of his best works[2]: 55 [7]: 145–146 [10] The parish house designed by McKim, Mead and White took a previously existing building and turned it into a Northern Renaissance-inspired building of yellow brick with bottle-glass windows.