Long Island City is officially landing its first new for-sale tower on the waterfront in more than a decade, and the homes are on the market. ZD Jasper launched sales September 17 at Paragon LIC, a 23-story, 182-residence condominium at 45-40 Vernon Boulevard on Anable Basin, with prices starting at $765,000 and occupancy slated for later this fall.
The tower rises 262 feet out of a 1930s paint factory, and it takes its name from it. The Paragon Paint Factory sat abandoned after its owner died in 2004, and rather than clear it, Archimaera kept the structure as the base and stepped the new brick-and-glass tower 80 feet back behind it. Above the factory, double-height balconies sit in copper-toned projecting frames beneath a glass crown of vertical bronze fins.
Construction started in October 2024. By spring 2025 ZD Jasper had closed $125 million in financing from iCross Capital, and the facade is now complete.
The 182 homes run from studios to four bedrooms, most of them facing the East River and the Manhattan skyline across the basin. Ceilings will reach up to 12 feet behind triple-paned floor-to-ceiling windows. Kitchens will carry natural marble counters with full-height Estremoz Calacatta backsplashes and Bosch appliances, and in the penthouses that becomes Breccia Capraia and Gaggenau. Every home will get a washer and dryer, LATCH keyless entry and a Nest thermostat.
Studios open at $765,000. One-bedrooms start at $965,000, two-bedrooms at $1.5 million and three-bedrooms at $2.075 million, with the top of the offering marketed at about $4.65 million. For a shoreline that has gone ten years without a new for-sale building, those figures double as the first fresh comps on the water. Roughly 30 percent of the homes were reportedly in contract before the public launch, after what ZD Jasper describes as a whisper campaign driven by local demand.
"Paragon has been executed with precision and we are thrilled with early sales activity defined by locals eager to trade up," said Jasper Wu, vice president of ZD Jasper.
MAWD | March and White Design handled the interiors, working off the building's light and its position on the water. "At Paragon, the interiors are designed around the way people actually want to live, creating spaces that feel considered but never overly formal," said Elliot March, the firm's co-founder.
The amenities will climb the building. A fitness center will connect to a fifth-floor outdoor fitness and yoga terrace, with an outdoor pickleball court, a golf simulator, a karaoke room, a children's playroom and a co-working lounge in between. The 20th floor will hold a Sky Lounge with indoor and outdoor seating, and the roof will be a landscaped terrace with grills, all set under a working solar canopy.
At street level, the plans call for a 24-hour attended lobby, bicycle storage and a package room with an Amazon Hub. Read top to bottom, the list sits closer to a Hudson Yards amenity sheet than to anything else on this stretch of Vernon Boulevard, and that is the comparison the pricing is built on.
From Vernon Boulevard, the factory stands at the water's edge with the tower behind it. Along the basin, ground-floor retail and a public waterfront park and walkway will reconnect the neighborhood to the East River, on a site that has been idle since 2004.
The rest of Long Island City's pipeline on record is inland; in Court Square, a new look was revealed this year for 24-19 Jackson Avenue. ZD Jasper calls Paragon the only new condo announced for this corner of the neighborhood, and the firm and Archimaera arrive at Anable Basin off Sorin, their 52-home condominium in Hudson Yards that launched sales this year, a smaller building in a far more tested market.
SERHANT. New Development leads sales and marketing. "The market has been waiting over ten years for this tower," said Ryan Serhant, the firm's founder and CEO. ZD Jasper, founded by Tom Wu in 1996, has overseen more than 5 million square feet of development across the city.
Move-ins could begin as early as November, according to ZD Jasper. When they do, Paragon becomes the first new for-sale address on the Long Island City waterfront in more than a decade, on a river the borough's condo pipeline had stayed away from for years.