Gerald Douglas Hines was born in Gary, Ind., on Aug. 15, 1925, to Gordon and Myrtle (McConnell) Hines. His mother was a teacher and homemaker; his father was an electrician for the U.S. Steel mill there. When Gerald was 14, he got a part-time job at the steel mill hammering bars of steel into small pieces. “I saw the inside of that steel mill, and I said there is no way I want to work there for my career,” he told his biographer, Mark Seal. He decided to become an engineer and enrolled at Purdue University.

He graduated in 1948 with a degree in mechanical engineering and took a job with American Blower, an industrial furnace and air-conditioning manufacturer in Detroit. The company offered him the opportunity to go to Indianapolis, Baltimore or Houston. He chose Houston, he said, because five of his former fraternity brothers had moved there, and he thought the city was beginning to boom.

For the first few months he lived at the Y.M.C.A. and then moved with his fraternity brothers into a small apartment. Next door was a unit occupied by Dorothy Schwarz, a young occupational therapist from New York who was a granddaughter of the founder of the F.A.O. Schwarz toy store. The two were married in 1952.

Mr. Hines was working for a small firm called Texas Engineering in 1951 when he decided to buy the small house it worked out of, convinced that the neighborhood, near downtown Houston, was changing and that he could profit from its transformation into a commercial area. He sold the house six years later for almost twice what he had paid for it and became a full-time real estate developer.

In 1980, Mr. Hines and his first wife divorced, and in 1981 he married Barbara Fritzsche, a German-born artist who had grown up in Australia. He had homes in New York City and Houston as well as in Greenwich and Aspen.

In addition to his wife and his son Jeff, from his first marriage, he is survived by a daughter, Jennifer Hines Robertson, also from his first marriage; another son, Trevor, and a daughter, Serena Hines, both from his second marriage; 15 grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. Dorothy Schwarz Hines died in 2017.

In 2002, Mr. Hines was the first real estate developer to win the Urban Land Institute J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionary Urban Development, and in 2007 the architecture school of the University of Houston, which is housed in another Johnson and Burgee building, was renamed the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design.

Source: New York Times

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