The Pritzkers' Empire Trembles

For Penny S. Pritzker, the 42-year-old firebrand who is carving out a leading role in her family's multibillion-dollar empire, this year should have been a time of triumph. Her nationwide network of upscale retirement communities, multifamily housing developments, and office park complexes has been growing like kudzu. She expects soon to break ground on a $350 million, 40-story office tower in the heart of Chicago to house her family's main businesses, the Pritzker Organization and Hyatt Corp. To top it all off, the fitness buff can still run circles around her male cousins, averaging about 8 1/2 minutes a mile in a recent half-marathon.

But this year may go down as one of the worst ever for the ambitious Penny Pritzker and her storied Chicago family. The collapse of Superior Bank, a $2.3 billion thrift that Pritzker chaired from 1989 to 1994, is putting the family's business savvy under the klieg lights in Washington and beyond. Profits are under pressure at its 203 Hyatt hotels--it owns 34--all across the world, just as the Pritzkers map out final plans for a controversial $1.2 billion development project along Boston's waterfront. And a major engine of the family's wealth, its $7 billion-a-year Marmon Group Inc. industrial and financial conglomerate, is sputtering in the manufacturing downturn as questions arise about who will succeed Marmon Chief Executive Robert A. Pritzker, one of the architects of the Pritzker fortune, who turned 75 this year.