The Paragon Cafe is a heritage-listed restaurant located at 65 Katoomba Street, Katoomba in the City of Blue Mountains local government area of New South Wales, Australia. It was designed in successive stages by Harry & Ernest Sidgreaves shopfitters, architects Harry Lindsay Blackwood and George Newton Kenworthy, with decoration by Otto Steen, and built from 1909 to 1940. It is also known as Paragon Restaurant or simply The Paragon. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 5 March 2015. History Indigenous history Prior to European settlement the Blue Mountains was the home of many autonomous Aboriginal groups who lived and moved around the region. There are six distinct tribal groups who have traditional rights and custodial responsibilities for the indigenous heritage of the region that are: the Darug, the Gandangurra, the Wanaruah, the Wiradjuri, the Darkinjung and the Tharawal. Evidence of Aboriginal occupation and custodianship of the country within Blue Mountains National Park dates back to possibly 22,000 years. The Blue Mountains contain a large number of significant sites which capture the relationship that Aboriginal people have had with country for thousands of generations. The rich and varied evidence of traditional occupation of the reserves include archaeological deposits in open sites and rock shelters, stone implements, factory sites for tool production, axe grinding grooves and extensive art-work, including drawn, painted and stencilled images. Tracks and figurative motifs dominate the art sites. Motifs include anthropomorphic figures, animals, hand stencils and tracks of birds and kangaroos. Colonial history Katoomba initially developed in a fashion quite distinct from the other Blue Mountains townships along the 1860s railway line. From 1874 onwards trains halted at The Crushers, in the vicinity of the later station, not for passengers but for stone quarried near the later courthouse. The first settlement in the area was to the south-west of the railway, near Katoomba Falls, where [[John Britty North]] opened a coal-mine complex in the Jamison Valley in 1878. There was a village near the top of Katoomba Falls and another village grew up deep down in the valley itself close to the base of the Falls, just below where the Scenic Railway ends today. North built a private tramway from the top of the incline near Katoomba Falls to join the main western railway line at what is now known as Shell Corner, a kilometre west of the present station. All this