Business

Hello to a more public-friendly 60 Wall St. — and farewell to one of the least-loved public spaces of the boom-and-bust 1980s.  One of the Reagan Decade’s defining office skyscrapers is about to undergo a more than $250 million upgrade for the post-pandemic era. Changes to 60 Wall planned by owner Paramount Group at the soon-to-be-empty, 47-story, 1.6 million square-foot tower include a more open portico and heavily windowed façade treatment on lower floors to create transparency with the street, and an enhanced ventilation system that utilizes virus-blocking, MERV 15 filtration.  But the centerpiece will be a stunning new public atrium lobby to replace the badly dated one installed by original tower owner JP Morgan, which later sold it to Deutsche Bank. Deutsche, the only current tenant, will begin moving to Time Warner Center this year. Paramount will start work on the redesign when Deutsche’s lease expires in June of 2022.  The vast original lobby was never as popular as architects Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo hoped.  Flared-top columns were meant to echo the tower’s Postmodern, Greek Revival-inspired facade. But critic Paul Goldberger called it a “cloying mix of white marble, lots of trelliswork, mirrors and marble grids” that was

Henry Ford’s great-great-granddaughter has become the first woman in history to take a seat on the company’s board of directors. Alexandra Ford English, 33, who has an MBA from Harvard and an undergraduate degree from Stanford, will begin her tenure on the 14-member board immediately, which will also include her cousin, Henry Ford III, the founder’s great-great-grandson, according to a report. English, the daughter of the company’s executive chairman Bill Ford, joined the 118-year-old company in 2017 and works as director of corporate strategy. Both Ford and English were elected to the board in March.

Cinema operator AMC Entertainment Holdings has raised about $428 million from a share sale, capitalizing on the retail-trading driven surge in its stock earlier this year. The world’s largest cinema chain operator’s shares have gained more than five-folds in 2021 thanks to interest from amateur traders on Reddit that were piling into heavily shorted stocks such as GameStop and AMC to punish hedge funds that bet against them. AMC said in a statement Thursday it had sold 43 million shares at an average price of $9.94 apiece in the at-the-market offering, sending its stock nearly 16 percent higher. The company has raised funds in the past few months to ride out a downturn in its business wrought by pandemic-driven theater closures, delays in the launch of big movies and the growth of video streaming platforms. It said in January it had raised $917 million since mid-December through equity and debt issues. It raised an additional $304.8 million in the same month through a share sale.

The Paramus Fairway’s getting a fresh start. An Amazon Fresh supermarket is set to replace the shuttered Fairway Market in Paramus, N.J. The Jeff Bezos-owned e-commerce giant bought the former Fairway location out of bankruptcy auction along with another former Fairway store in Woodland Park for a total of $1.5 million last March, The Post previously reported.  Amazon’s plans for the two locations were listed as confidential at the time, but came as the Seattle-based company, which also owns Whole Foods, was beginning to expand in the groceries space.  But Amazon confirmed in November the former Woodland Park Fairway would be converted into an Amazon Fresh. And now, the Paramus location will go the same route, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed to NorthJersey.com.  It’s not clear when opening day will be, and the company did not return The Post’s request for comment.  Amazon opened its first Fresh store in Los Angeles’ Woodland Hills neighborhood in September. It’s since opened 11 other locations elsewhere in California and in Illinois, according to the tech giant’s website.  Amazon Fresh is the company’s attempt to offer a mix of in-store and online grocery shopping while attracting a distinct demographic from Whole Foods by offering lower

A collection of nine so-called CryptoPunks were sold at auction as non-fungible tokens for $16.9 million, roughly double what Christie’s estimated the digital art would fetch. It’s the latest sale of NFTs to bring in eye-popping valuations, piquing interest in the space. NFTs are digital assets that represent ownership of virtual items like art and sports memorabilia.  Ownership of NFTs are recorded on a blockchain network, which supports cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether. CryptoPunks were one of the earliest NFT projects and have risen in value as collector’s items. The project included a total of 10,000 small pixel-art portraits of people, zombies, aliens, and apes. Larva Labs, which created the CryptoPunks project in 2017 on the Ethereum blockchain, says on its website that the series “inspired the modern CryptoArt movement.” When Larva Labs created the figures in 2017, it kept 1,000, but gave away the rest for free to anyone with an Ethereum wallet. The collection of CryptoPunks sold at the Christie’s auction house came directly from Larva Labs. Christie’s did not identify the buyer.  Each CryptoPunks figure was algorithmically generated and has unique attributes, from hairstyle and glasses to hats and smoking accessories.  The nine that sold

Figures released Tuesday by the American Gaming Association, the casino industry’s national trade group, show the nation’s commercial casinos took in over $11.1 billion in the first quarter of this year. America’s commercial casinos matched their best quarter ever in the first three months of this year, as customers continued returning amid the COVID-19 pandemic and internet and sports betting money helped boost revenue numbers. That matched the industry’s best quarter in history, the third quarter of 2019. The figures do not include tribal casinos. And March was a particularly good month: 12 states reported their highest-ever levels of monthly gambling revenue. The 2021 first-quarter revenue numbers represented a nearly 18 percent increase over the first quarter of 2020, when the pandemic began to take hold nationwide, and an increase of more than 4 percent from the first quarter of 2019, before the pandemic began. The numbers were even more heartening to industry executives because they came while most casinos were still operating under capacity restrictions designed to slow the spread of the virus. “Today’s report shows gaming’s comeback is ahead of schedule,” said Bill Miller, the association’s president and CEO. “Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, our industry has faced numerous

Investors pulled back on stocks Tuesday as a sell-off that began in tech companies broadened to other sectors, sending the major US indices down. The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled about 450 points, or 1.3 percent, in mid-day trading. The S&P 500 was 0.8 percent lower and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite edged just 0.1 percent lower, but was down as much as 2.2 percent earlier in the day. Investor concerns over rising inflation costs have hit high-growth tech stocks in recent weeks. The Nasdaq is down nearly 5 percent since the start of the month. But the sell off spread Tuesday to other sectors, hitting everything from retailers to industrials and banks. “What started in technology earlier this month has finally moved over to the broader markets,” Ryan Detrick, chief market strategist at LPL Financial, said. “Although we are coming off a record earnings season, continued supply chain and labor shortages are adding to potential inflationary pressures.” Companies from Occidental Petroleum and Home Depot to Caesars Entertainment and home-builder D.R. Horton were among the stocks leading the markets lower. All traded at least 3 percent lower in afternoon trading. There were, however, some companies that bucked the trend. Palantir, for

The world’s most powerful internet porn company is owned by a shadowy businessman who barely exists online, a new report says. Bernard Bergemar is the biggest owner of MindGeek, the Luxembourg-based conglomerate behind popular porn sites such as Pornhub, YouPorn and Brazzers, a Financial Times investigation found. MindGeek had long kept Bergemar’s identity a closely held secret that only a handful of company executives and their advisers knew about, according to the paper. Before Thursday, his name only appeared in three Google search results related to his past role as an executive at RedTube, a porn platform MindGeek now owns. While he’s not mentioned in the company’s corporate filings, the Financial Times revealed that Bergemar is MindGeek’s largest beneficiary thanks in part to a “complex network of subsidiaries” in which he owns a large chunk of the shares. For instance, MindGeek has a $200 million debt to one of those subsidiaries that’s paid in installments as large as $1.8 million a month, adding up to an amount that outpaces the company’s declared profits in some years, according to the paper. Bergemar declined to talk to the Financial Times, and The Post could not find contact information for him online. Pornhub