For decades, Marian “Cindy” Pritzker, the matriarch of one of Chicago’s wealthiest and best-known families, was a mainstay in Chicago’s philanthropic, cultural and civic communities. Like her late husband, Jay, who built the Hyatt Hotels chain, Pritzker was an architectural aficionado who pl ayed a role in the creation of several cultural touchstones in Chicago, among them the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park, which was designed by noted architect Frank Gehry, and the Harold Washington Library Center in the Loop, which came to fruition while she headed the Chicago Public Library Board. Pritzker, who was 101, died Saturday, according to a family spokesperson. She was the aunt of Gov. JB Pritzker and had homes in Streeterville and Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. Born Marian Friend in Chicago in 1923 to Cook County Judge Hugo Friend and Sadie Cohen Friend, Pritzker was the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Two years before Pritzker was born, her father was assigned to preside over the notorious Chicago “Black Sox” trial, in which eight former White Sox players were indicted — but ultimately acquitted — on charges of throwing the 1919 World Series. The players were banned from baseball. Pritzker grew up in the South Side Kenwood neighborhood. “I had the time of my life,” she told Chicago History magazine in 2001. “Kenwood really was like the suburbs at that time. There were slews of children on the block. We were like a roving band, so after school, they put sawhorses on either end of the street, and we used to play baseball and all sorts of games. It was a wonderful way to grow up.” Pritzker attended the University of Chicago Laboratory School for a time and then graduated in 1943 from Hyde Park High School. She attended Grinnell College in Iowa from 1943 until 1945. Pritzker was not yet a teenager when she met her future husband on a family vacation at a summer cottage in Eagle River, Wis. The couple married in 1947 and remained so until his death in 1999. The Pritzkers moved around while Jay ran a lumber business, but eventually returned to the Chicago area and settled in Winnetka. Pritzker raised her family there before she and her husband moved to Chicago in 1979. Pritzker’s husband and his brother, Robert Pritzker, built on the family fortune started by their father, A.N. Pritzker, and their uncles. Jay and Robert Pritzker recognized an increase in postwar business travel and saw there would be a need for hotels near airports. In addition to creating the Hyatt Hotels chain, the brothers’ Marmon Group holding company owned a diverse array of businesses, and became a $15 billion empire encompassing more than 200 companies. By the late 1960s, Cindy Pritzker was a visible figure in Chicago’s charitable community, including co-chairing the annual Crystal Ball, a fundraising event that raised money for Michael Reese Hospital’s Medical Research Institute. She also served on the board of Grinnell College from 1971 until 1978, and in 1981, she was behind the creation of the Columbian Ball, which is the Museum of Science and Industry’s annual fundraising event. She went on to cochair several Columbian Balls. In the late 1970s, Pritzker and her husband were approached about establishing a major annual prize to living architect or architects for significant achievement. The couple were amenable to the idea, and the Pritzker Prize, first awarded to architect Philip Johnson in 1979, went on to become the world’s single most prestigious architecture award. 5 things to know about Cindy Pritzker Two decades later, Pritzker and her husband were honored by President Bill Clinton at the White House for the prize’s staying power, with major Chicago architects like Helmut Jahn, Stanley Tigerman and Thomas Beeby looking on. In 1982, Pritzker commissioned Andy Warhol to produce a silkscreen portrait, which now hangs above the fireplace in Pritzker’s namesake rooftop restaurant, Cindy’s, in the Chicago Athletic Association building on Michigan Avenue. She was appointed to the Chicago Public Library’s board in 1984 by Mayor Harold Washington.  During Pritzker’s time on the board, after more than a dozen years of wrangling over the location for a new central library, an urban renewal site at the south end of the Loop was chosen. After an international design competition, Pritzker was part of the 11-person jury that unanimously chose the Sebus Group and the architectural firm of Hammond, Beeby & Babka Inc., to design and build the library. The Harold Washington Library Center opened in 1991, and its auditorium now bears Pritzker’s name, as does a park across the street. The private Chicago Public Library Foundation had been formed in 1986 to benefit the library, and the following year, Pritzker and her husband donated $1 million to the foundation. Pritzker soon became chairwoman of the foundation. In 1989, Pritzker also was chosen by the library board’s other eight members to be board president. Pritzker worked to increase the library’s book budget, and she also chaired the search committee that led to the 1994 hiring of lawyer Mary Dempsey as library commissioner. Well-respected for overseeing the construction of 44 libraries during her tenure and renovating several others while also reimagining library spaces as places for community engagement and updated technology, Dempsey held the role until resigning in 2012. Pritzker left the libary board in 1998 and  stepped down as library foundation chair in 2004. Her civic and philanthropic work continued with the planning for Millennium Park, and Pritzker was instrumental in persuading architect Frank Gehry to design what first was known as the Millennium Park Music Pavilion. Pritzker and her family donated $15 million toward the Gehry bandshell, a striking structure topped by billowing, curled ribbons of stainless steel and joined to a huge steel trellis extending over the bandshell’s entire audience. “Once you’ve made a suggestion, you have to be willing to put your money behind it,” Pritzker told the Tribune’s Chris Jones in 2004. The pavilion eventually was named the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park, and it was dedicated in July 2004 at a black-tie fundraiser. “I know Jay’s spirit is smiling down on us,” Pritzker told those gathered at the fundraiser, according to a 2004 Tribune article. Before Jay Pritzker’s death, he drew up an agreement with other family members that was aimed at ensuring that the family’s businesses would continue to be run more or less as they had been before, under the leadership of the next generation. However, shortly after his death, his heirs replaced that pact with a new agreement that called for the family’s $15 billion fortune to be sold, with the proceeds redistributed. Then, one heir, niece Liesel Pritzker, who was excluded from that replacement deal, sued other family members in 2002, alleging that her trust funds were looted by family members, shortchanging her by $1 billion. Inside the Pritzker family feud Cindy Pritzker issued a written statement calling that publicity “extremely painful” and that it had caused “significant confusion regarding the direction and values of the family as established by my husband, Jay.” In 2005, the lawsuit was settled, with Liesel Pritzker and her brother, Matthew, relinquishing their claim on family assets in exchange for $500 million each. Survivors include three sons, Tom, John and Daniel; a daughter, Gigi Pritzker Pucker; and 14 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Nancy, died in 1972. Services will be private. Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.     ...read more read less