Broadway Mansions - Notable Residents

Notable Residents

• Cornelius Vander Starr (15 October 1892 – 20 December 1968), an American businessman and Office of Strategic Services operative who founded the American International Group (AIG) insurance corporation in Shanghai in 1919, occupied the penthouse of the Broadway Mansions until the outbreak of World War II;
• American journalist Hallett Edward Abend (born 15 September 1884 in Portland, Oregon; died 28 November 1955 in Sonora, California), correspondent for The New York Times, had a long term lease, and lived and worked from Apartment G, "a luxurious penthouse", on the 16th floor, from 1935 until July 1940. On the evening of 19 July 1940, Abend was robbed and tortured by two Japanese men in his room, who "next morning again wore the uniform of officers of the Imperial Army of Japan." The next morning Abend moved "to another apartment in an area supervised by the Americans and British. In August 1937, after all tenants had been evacuated from the Mansions by Japanese forces, Abend's apartment was searched by men believed to be associated with the Japanese consulate;
• Italian Amleto Vespa (1888-c.1940), a mercenary and secret agent for Manchuria and later reluctantly for the Empire of Japan, lived at the Mansions from 1937;
• Japanese ultra-nationalist yakuza figure and convicted Class A war criminal Yoshio Kodama (児玉誉士夫 18 February 1911 - 17 January 1984), stayed at the Broadway Mansions during the Second Sino-Japanese War;
• American Robert Shaplen, foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, resided at the Broadway Mansions for two years immediately after the conclusion of World War II;
• American Jack Birns, one of Life magazine's staff photo journalists, resided at the Broadway Mansions from 15 December 1947;
• French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (22 August 1908 – 3 August 2004), considered to be the father of modern photojournalism, and co-founder of Magnum Photos, an international photographic cooperative, lived in the Broadway Mansions for a year from the middle of 1949, covering the fall of the Nationalist government and the creation of the People's Republic of China;