Jay Pritzker, whose hunch in the 1950's that America's restless business executives would flock to hotels near airports prompted him to build the Hyatt hotel chain, died yesterday of cardiac arrest at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Mr. Pritzker, who had a history of heart trouble, was 76.
Despite a personal aversion to publicity, Mr. Pritzker and his brother, Robert, were routinely celebrated on the world's financial news pages for their business acumen.
As two of the world's richest men, they built an enormous business empire called Marmon Corporation, which over the years had interests in Braniff Airlines, McCall's magazine, Levitz Furniture and Ticketmaster, as well as casinos in Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe and Atlantic City. Last year, Forbes magazine estimated the brothers' net worth at $13.5 billion, up from $6 billion the year before.
Jay Pritzker was a trustee of the University of Chicago and in 1979 endowed the Pritzker Architectural Prize, sometimes called architecture's Nobel Prize, which carries a $100,000 award. He also founded the Nancy Friend Pritzker Laboratory for the study of clinical depression at Stanford University. It is named for his daughter.
A lawyer and accountant by training, Mr. Pritzker began buying small companies when he was 29, first timber mills, then a small metal-goods company. But he was best known for the business deal he hatched in 1957 over a cup of coffee at a coffee shop called Fat Eddie's at Los Angeles International Airport.
While waiting for a flight, Mr. Pritzker noticed that Fat Eddie's seemed to be unusually busy for a coffee shop, and that the hotel in which it was located did not have any vacancies. The hotel -- named after its owner, Hyatt Von Dehn -- was for sale, and Mr. Pritzker decided on the spot to buy it and Fat Eddie's, writing his offer of $2.2 million on a napkin.
Mr. Pritzker bet, correctly, that business executives like himself would want to stay at a quality hotel near a large airport. The Hyatt was ''simply the first first-class hotel that I had ever seen at an airport,'' Mr. Pritzker later told the Chicago Daily News.
After building a second Hyatt hotel in Burlingame, Calif., near San Francisco International Airport, the brothers concentrated their hotel properties near airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, then around the country and internationally. Hyatt Hotels Corporation, which last year had annual revenues of $3 billion, has 182 hotels and 34 under construction.
''He had a lot of guts,'' said Douglas G. Geoga, president of the Hyatt Hotels subsidiary, recalling that Mr. Pritzker in 1967 bought a half-finished hotel in Atlanta and turned it into the Hyatt Regency. The first of the giant atrium hotels, the Hyatt Regency Atlanta struck doubters as a white elephant, Mr. Geoga said.
Mr. Pritzker, he recalled, said that some visitors actually worried that the Regency's atrium was so towering that hot air would rise, condense and then form a miniature rainstorm inside the hotel. Mr. Pritzker liked to gently scoff that ''that sort of concern reflected a degree of overeducation,'' Mr. Geoga said.
Jay Pritzker was born on Aug. 26, 1922, to Fanny Doppelt and Abram Nicholas Pritzker and was the grandson of Nicholas and Annie Pritzker.
Mr. Pritzker majored in accounting and received a bachelor's degree from Northwestern University in 1941. His grandfather founded a Chicago law firm, now called Pritzker & Pritzker, where Jay Pritzker worked for a time after graduating from Northwestern University Law School in 1947 and serving in World War II as a naval aviator.
Mr. Pritzker is survived by his wife, Marian, their four children and 13 grandchildren and his brother, Robert.
Mr. Pritzker's brother Donald and his oldest child, Nancy, died in 1972.