The 1841 Church of the Ascension Rectory -- No. 7 West 10th Street

photo by Beyond My Ken

By 1839 when Richard Upjohn was chosen to design the new Church of the Ascension just above Washington Square, he had achieved a reputation as an esteemed architect. He was also well known for his leanings towards “High Church” and those leanings would result in a clash.

The congregation lost its Gothic-style church on Sunday, June 30 of that year when a fire after services destroyed the building. After heated arguments that finally split the congregation, the decision was made to move the church uptown to Fifth Avenue. Here fashionable homes were just appearing as the mansions of Washington Square spilled northward.

The Episcopal Church at this time was clearly divided between High Church – such as Trinity Church with much pomp and elaborate ritual – and Low Church, intent on less complex liturgies and closer spiritual contact with the congregants.

Dr. Manton Eastburn, the rector, was decidedly Low Church and had no intentions to allow Upjohn to create a long chancel intended for majestic processions. Upjohn, on the other hand, pressed for the traditional deep chancel expected in Gothic architecture.

To ensure Upjohn would not get his way, Eastburn purchased that land at No. 7 West 10th Street as the site of the rectory; effectively limiting the length of the church structure. Now there “would be no room for high church doings," as he put it.

According to the National Register of Historic Places, “aside from this difference of opinion, the church was a great success.”

Both the church and the rectory were completed in 1841 at a cost of $46,459.75 – a dizzying sum. The architect carried the Gothic Revival style of the church through to the rectory, creating a charismatic cottage that appears both dignified and cozy.

It was also ground-breaking. The rectory was the first residential building in Manhattan to be faced with brownstone. This locally-plentiful sandstone is stained a warm chocolate color from iron deposits. Before long the material would be so commonly used in the construction of townhouses and mansions that the Manhattan row house today is still referred to as a “brownstone.”

It was, as architectural historian Charles Lockwood put it, “a startling architectural innovation at the time of its construction.”

The rectory rose two floors over an English basement with an attic. Both the entrance door and the windows, the frames of which gently angled in, were topped by carved square-headed Gothic eyebrows. Above, lancet windows graced the dormers, one of which jutted out mid-cornice, supported on small brownstone brackets, creating a charming picturesque appeal.

The Ascension Rectory was frequently used as a meeting space and lecture hall. In 1887 repeated meetings were held here by the Citizens’ Committee on High License. The group was intent on the passing of the High License Bill which would make liquor licenses more difficult to obtain.

Their expressed goal was “restricting a traffic which imposes upon the city enormous expense and evils innumerable.”

In March of 1895 a series of lectures was highly publicized. Harvard professor George H. Palmer gave a series of four lectures on “The Province of Ethics in Relation to Neighboring Provinces,” which the New Outlook promised “will awaken a good deal of interest, for Professor Palmer is not only a man of thorough scholarship, with a trained philosophical mind, but he is also a very charming speaker.”

The hearts of New Yorkers were touched when, in May 1921, a five-pound baby girl was left in a basket on the doorstep of the rectory. The housekeeper, Mrs. John Graham, found the basket – from which The Times said, “issued a voice with the fierce, peremptory and threatening ring which comes from the chests of new babies and masters of sailing ships.”

Although the rector, Dr. Percy Stickney Grant, ran down 10th Street in an attempt to find the parent, no one could be found. A note in the basket said that the parents had heard favorable comments on the church and Dr. Grant and believed “the child’s welfare was assured in his hands.”

Detectives making the investigation asserted that “the writer of the note found with the child was a person of some culture.” Cultured or not, the parents were never found.

Dr. Grant received permission from the Charities Department to keep the week-old infant; at least temporarily. Grant told reporters “I will keep it until I find out what is best for its welfare.”

Grant baptized the little girl on May 5, giving her the name Faith Willard. Five months later she was still in his care in the rectory and, according to The Times, had “endeared herself to the heart of the bachelor clergyman.”

Tragedy came when little Faith was taken to Presbyterian Hospital in October with intestinal problems that resulted in septic poisoning and pneumonia. New Yorkers read with grief of the heart-broken rector’s pain as he watched his little ward dying. “When I saw her pitiful little frame and how she was suffering,” said Grant, “and realized that she was likely to die, I could comprehend the pain of a parent separated from his child.”

Nearly a century later Leo J. Blackman Architects were brought in to update the rectory. The basement level contained a Sunday School room that received very little natural light. The architects excavated the garden, expanded the rear window openings allowing daylight to pour in, and created handicapped access.

According to the firm’s website “The design preserves the character of the rectory by retaining as much existing fabric as possible, with only necessary and efficient interventions.”

The 1841 Gothic Revival building that introduced brownstone to Manhattan home builders is as charming today as it was in 1841.

The 1841 Church of the Ascension

On a clear Wednesday morning on June 26, 1844 the President of the United States quietly left New York's Howard's Hotel in a carriage pulled by four horses.  John Tyler had been widowed for two years and he and his staff had taken every precaution to keep his visit a secret.  The hotel staff had been ordered not to talk and "all the servants locked up" to keep them quiet.

The secrecy had nothing to do with security, the type of which surrounds the president today; that was of little importance in the first half of the 19th Century.  Instead the president had traveled to New York to be married to the beautiful Julia Gardiner.  The fact that Julia was 30 years younger than the 54 year-old president had already caused minor scandal in Washington social circles.

Tyler's carriage took him to No. 430 LaGrange Terrace, the home of Julia's parents.  The couple emerged, she in a white wedding dress and veil, and proceeded to the new Church of the Ascension on lower Fifth Avenue.

The church had its beginnings on October 1, 1827 when a group of men met to form a new parish.  The city was rapidly growing with a population of 200,000, the majority of those being Episcopalians.  They called their new parish the Church of the Ascension and, after meeting for two years in a room on Howard Street and Broadway, erected a white Greek Revival church that was dedicated on May 23, 1829 on Canal Street.

Church membership grew rapidly and after a fire totally destroyed the building following services on Sunday June 30, 1839 there was talk about moving the parish uptown.  Talk turned to argument and the congregation became irreparably divided.  Ten months later the "uptown" faction laid the cornerstone of a brownstone church at the somewhat remote corner of Fifth Avenue and 10th Street.

The young, fledgling architect Richard Upjohn was chosen to design the Gothic Revival church.  In only a few years he would become esteemed for other Gothic churches in the city like the Church of the Holy Communion on 20th Street and the new Trinity Church downtown.

Completed in 1841 it was the first church on Fifth Avenue.  An Englishman, Upjohn modeled its tall, spired bell tower on the one at Magdalen College, Oxford, England.  The area was still relatively undeveloped and the avenue was not yet paved.  That was soon to change.

By the time President Tyler and his bride were married here three years later mansions had begun cropping up along Fifth Avenue above Washington Square where fine Federal residences had already been firmly established.  The list of church members soon included names like Belmont, Rhinelander, Astor and de Peyster.

A progressive church nearly from its inception, the parish donated hundreds of thousands of dollars for outside charities in the mid-19th Century, many far away: the Irish Potato Famine, the construction of buildings at Virginia Theological Seminary and Kenyon College in Ohio, establishment of churches as distant as Libya and the founding of the Five Points Day School which fed, clothed and educated the children of the most deprived section of the city.

What comes to the minds of most New Yorkers, though, is the artwork and superb interior of Acension.  In 1885 Julia and Serena Rhinelander, the daughters of William C. Rhinelander, funded the redecoration of the somewhat drab chancel area as a memorial to their parents.  After a four year renovation overseen by Stanford White the church became a virtual repository of late 19th Century masterworks.

The tour de force is the enormous John LaFarge painting "The Ascension of Our Lord" over the main altar.  Painted in place on canvas, it is considered one of the most important mural decorations in the United States.  Four of the exquisite stained glass windows were also executed by LaFarge.

Directly below the painting are two bas-relief angles sculpted by Louis St. Gaudens.  Embedded in the marble just below them and on either side of the altar are intricate mosaic angels by D. Maitland Armstrong who also designed two of the stained glass windows.  The oak choir stalls were designed by McKim, Mead and White.   Hundreds of thousands of small stone tiles make up the multicolored mosaic floors.

Photograph by David Shankbone

It was here, during the Great Depression, that homeless men came to sleep on the oaken pews.  In 1957 the Municipal Art Society and the Society of Architectural Historians deemed the Church of the Ascension "nationally important."  Yet despite the priceless artwork in the sanctuary, the doors were never locked, day or night, from 1929 until October 1966, when, finally, increased crime made the advisability of leaving the church open questionable. 
Declared a National Historic Landmark in 1988, the church is open weekdays from noon to 1 pm.