Before gentrification took hold of Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn, the editor-in-chief of Essence Magazine, Monique Greenwood, and her husband Glenn Pogue, took a chance and bought a sprawling estate the kids called the “haunted mansion.” They transformed it and then renamed it Akwaaba Mansion, a Ghanaian word meaning “welcome.” And guest truly feel welcomed as they come to relax, rest, be pampered, celebrate special occasions or just get together with friends.
Twenty four years later, they turned their initial purchase into Akwaaba Bed & Breakfast Inns, with additional locations in Philadelphia, Cape May, New Jersey, Washington, D.C. and Bethany, Pennsylvania. Greenwood told 1010 WINS Anchor Larry Mullins that she wanted people to “just take a moment for themselves, because we just run through life, and we wanted people to take a breath and feel affirmed by what they saw. So what we’ve done is combined all of the architectural Victorian touches with a flair of Afrocentricity.”
Greenwood runs the day-to-day operation as president and CEO, and she told Mullins that she set out to change the “perception” of Bed-Stuy as being a bad neighborhood. “People can’t believe the hype. When I discovered the neighborhood on a house tour I fell in love with the brownstones, but I really fell in love with the brown people. I said this is a community, this is what a community looks like and feels like and I wanted to try to change that misconception of that do-or-die Bed-Stuy thing, and I felt the easiest and best way to do that is invite people into my home and let them live with us and amongst them.”
When they first started it helped that their initial guest were people from the neighborhood—and then it took off. Greenwood told Mullins that some people doubted they would be successful and looked at her as if she had “three eyes,” but she says that “third eye is an eye of vision, it’s the ability to see the possibility and any entrepreneur, any change-maker has to have the third eye.”
Her perseverance paid off, as a network wanted to create a reality show that they happen to check all the boxes for. “They wanted it to be in the hospitality space,” Greenwood said. “They would like it to be owned by family, they would love it if it was a family of color, they wanted it to be headed by a woman and they wanted her to be outspoken so that was check, check, check!” They ended up signing with Lionsgate Entertainment Corp., who shopped it around. When Oprah Winfrey saw it, she fell in love with the concept “because I said one thing on my 30-second sizzle reel,” Greenwood said. “When our guests check in, they don’t just bring their luggage, sometimes they bring a lot of baggage and that’s when the innkeeper turns into the therapist.” And the Own Network series “Checked In” was born.
Greenwood is loving the journey and can be found making breakfast for her guests in whatever property she is visiting. “I feel like the most incredibly blessed person that I certainly know,” she said. And she's now able to fulfill her dream of leaving a legacy business and real estate for her daughter.