SARASOTA — For the past two decades, Kristin Kitchen has been restoring historic buildings and converting them into heritage accommodations that preserve and tell the African-American story.
But what she treasures most are the conversations that take place around the breakfast tables.
“These facilities are more than just places for guests to stay. They are gathering places for the community,” she said. “Our tag line at Six Acres (the B&B she opened in Cincinnati, Ohio) is: ‘Let’s share life over breakfast.’ We get a huge cross-section of people, and it’s all about sharing our commonalities. We let the breakfast table be a safe place for dialogue.”
And now Kitchen is watching the fate of the historic Colson Hotel in the former Overtown section of Sarasota. Developers want to tear it down, and the Sarasota City Commission is considering the proposal on Sept. 3.
“Communities are losing intangible assets when historic buildings are demolished and replaced with modern, high-density structures,” Kitchen said. “If we don’t save these structures, they can’t continue to tell their history and stories, and we lose our ability to connect people with their past.”
Kitchen, after earning her college degree in business administration and marketing, operated a retail store called Kristin’s in Cincinnati for 11 years. She eventually bought a 6,000-square-foot house that had been constructed in the 1850s and had, at one time, reportedly been a stop on the Underground Railroad.
“It was too big for me to live in by myself, so I decided to turn it into a bed and breakfast and invite others to come and stay and help me pay the utilities,” she said. “That’s how Six Acres got started.”
Kitchen said it took about a year to restore the building. It opened to the public in November 2004. The public is invited to have breakfast at the inn on weekends.
About 50 percent of the business’s revenue comes from hosting various events.
Kitchen recalled one family who were guests at the house and whose mother had walked across the (Edmund) Pettus Bridge with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“She was a white lady from Chicago who was passionate about it and had to borrow money from a black woman who worked for the family because her husband forbid her to go,” she said. “As it turns out, we had a person living in a condo across the street who had been a freedom rider during those days, and so I brought them together to share their experiences.”
Another time, there was a family of guests who were anti-Muslim, she recalled.
“I invited a friend, who is Muslim, to come join us at the breakfast table,” she said. “By the time they got up from the table at 1 p.m., they had completely changed their thoughts on all that bullcrap they had been watching on the news.”
Kitchen said there are a “ton” of MAGA-hatted guests at the breakfast table as well those who learned about the weekly event from like-minded individuals.
“We don’t have to have common experiences to have compassion and love and respect for each other,” she added.
Opening a Hotel in MiamiIn December 2019, Kitchen opened the Dunns Josephine Hotel in the historic Overtown District of Miami. The hotel offers 15 guest rooms decorated to celebrate both the Miami and Harlem Renaissance periods of glitz and old-world glamour.
Like Six Acres, the Dunn Josephine hosts dozens of events throughout the year, from wine tastings and community conversations, to picnics and even events for cigar aficionados.
“It’s so much more than a hotel,” she said. “Every weekend, somebody asks for a tour. Like our other accommodations, it serves as a gathering spot for our communities.”
Kitchen opened her third location in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in December 2021 after falling in love with the little city. She looked at several properties before purchasing the 8,000-square-foot home that had once been the residence of a large slave-owning family that owned the China American Tobacco Company.
Known as the Avent on Falls Bed & Breakfast, the 9-bedroom lodging introduces guests to the legacy of African-Americans in North Carolina working in the tobacco industry, from slavery to the present day.
Saying ‘no’ to big hotel chainsAs her heritage hotel business grew, and Kitchen talked at industry conferences about her unique brand, larger hotel chains like Marriott, Hilton and IHG began to take notice. When asked if she would be willing to slip her brand under theirs, her answer was always no.
“You can’t save history and be completely financially focused,” she said. “You have to make a decision about what is the key value?
“When I first created the brand and sat down with bankers to talk about expanding this business, they looked at me and asked: ‘But how are you going to make any money?’ I replied: ‘What if we measure our success not by how much money we make, but by what we do for the community? And how we inspire the children?’
“This brand is about soul-feeding, not about deep pockets. I need to definitely make money. But because we kind of live in this hybrid space, there’s a part of the world that wants to save, that wants to help.”
Kitchen believes in saving historic structures that help to tell the American story but says all facets of that history need to be preserved and not just the more notable.
“If we save JFK’s boyhood home, then we must save African-American history as well. I honor your history and your legacy, but we have to do that for all people.”
Watching the Colson Hotel in SarasotaOne example of selective preservation, she said, is the historic Colson Hotel in the former Overtown section of Sarasota that is at risk of being demolished.
The Colson was built in 1926 by noted developer Owen Burns and was named for community leader, the Rev. Louis Colson. The 26-room hotel served as a place where minorities could stay during the Jim Crow era.
The structure was purchased in 2021 by JDMAX Developments, and a permit was requested to demolish the building. Sarasota’s Historic Preservation Board denied the request, but the City Commission will consider granting the permit at their meeting scheduled for Sept. 3.
There apparently are a lot of breakfast tables in Kitchen’s future. When asked her goal for the business, she replied it is “to tell the African-American story in every city in the country where we merge, where our stories come together.
“We can overcome this place of divisiveness. Who knew 20 years ago that we would be here? Who knew that we would be this polarized in our conversations? I think about my little one (daughter) and the things she fears. Things I didn’t fear when I was her age.
“We’ve got to hold on to each other and the breakfast table gives us that opportunity.”
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