Famous Chicagoans: The Pritzker Family
One of America’s foremost dynasties, the Pritzkers are responsible for many things from Hyatt Hotels to the Marmon Group, builders of such ubiquitous objects as copper wire and shopping carts. Their biggest claim to fame, though, is probably the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest achievement which has been awarded to such luminaries as Zaha Hadid, Thom Mayne, Frank Gehry, and many others since it began to be awarded in 1979.
The Pritzker family is a true example of America’s can-do spirit realized. One of their own, Penny Pritzker was recently the National Finance Chair of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, likely putting in long hours at the phone banks to raise money from Obama’s celebrity friends like Jay Leno and Ashton Kutcher.
Despite being such a well known family, they are a bit under the radar in terms of available pictorial documentation. The above family portrait is, in fact, a collage based on several individual photographs found on the web, as I could not find a photograph of several members of the family together in one sitting.
