The Church of the Ascension was incorporated as a Protestant Episcopal parish of the Diocese of New York on October 1, 1827. On April 15, 1828 the cornerstone for the new church was placed in a lot on the north side of Canal Street, just east of Broadway. This first building resembled a Greek temple. in 1839, a fire started in the lumber of a carpenter’s shop at the rear of the Church of the Ascension and smoke and flames appeared during a Sunday service. The church and adjoining Sunday School building were destroyed. The Dutch Reformed congregation at East Ninth Street and Astor Place, east of Broadway, made their church available for the homeless parish.
The new Church of the Ascension, designed by Richard Upjohn, was consecrated by Bishop Onderdonk on November 5, 1841. 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. President Tyler, a widower, married Julia Gardiner, daughter of David Gardiner, at the Church of the Ascension on June 26, 1844. He was the first U.S. president to marry while in office.
In response to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the rector Donald Bradshaw Aldrich opened the doors of the church 24-hours a day for prayer and meditation, earning the church the name “The Church of the Open Door”. This policy was in effect for decades: about 30,000 people visited the church in the 1960s. Although the doors are not still open around the clock, the stained-glass windows are illuminated at night.
On September 11, 2001, New Yorkers, coated in ash from the buildings’ collapse, trudged uptown past the church. The rector, curate and staff rushed water and paper towels to use as makeshift dust masks out to the front of the church. The church doors were opened and people who were dazed, exhausted and in shock rested and took comfort in the church before heading further on their way uptown to find some way home.
The church became a National Historic Landmark in 1987. 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.