A luxury building on Central Park’s northernmost border is expected to open in September with 48 multi-million dollar units spread over 19 floors.

The blue-glass, L-shaped building, designed by architect Peter Schubert of Hillier Architecture, is a lightweight, modernist counterpoint to the heavy masonry feel of the rest of the neighborhood. The building, located at 111 Central Park North, is designed to maximize the view of a vast open park space stretching out before it.

“It’s a location very few people have actually been to or seen,” the executive director of development for the Athena Group, Gary Davis, said. “We are in the center of the park, and it’s a magnificent view that no one has ever really had before.”

The building, where units are selling for between $1.5 million and $8.5 million, features a private courtyard entrance on 110th Street and a 10,000-square-foot landscaped terrace overlooking the park.

“Urban buildings have a fundamental responsibility to the skyline,” Mr. Schubert said. “Since we were facing the park we figured that we needed to have a very clear, distinct profile in the skyline.”

The building’s $8.5 million penthouse apartment was named this year’s “ultimate bachelor pad” by Esquire magazine, but Mr. Davis said he hopes the two- and threebedroom units would attract families.

“It almost has a suburban kind of feel to it,” Mr. Davis said. “There is a private underground garage, it’s near public transportation so it’s an easy commute to Midtown. It feels almost like living in the country.”

Thirty-five of the units have already been sold.

“This project really substantiates that this part of the city is really becoming a part of the city,” Mr. Davis said. “A lot of people will want to live here who would normally have to go to the Upper West Side or the Upper East Side.”

The construction of the modern, luxury condominiums has angered some neighbors.

“First of all, it’s too damn big,” an architectural historian and the author of “Harlem Lost and Found,” Michael Henry Adams, said. “Harlem has always been six- and eight-story buildings. We are trading openness and a sense of space for something that looks just like the rest of Manhattan.”

The development also stoked some racial tension last year when a painted rendering of the project in front of an empty construction site depicted only white residents surrounding the building and using the neighborhood.

“What we are witnessing is nothing less than the destruction of a center of black history and culture,” Mr. Adams said. “I worry that we will one day see an island of Manhattan rid of a black presence.”