Walk through Green Apple Books’ Ninth Avenue location, past the notable new-fiction releases and the “sideline item” impulse buys, and you’ll see a velvet rope blocking a staircase that used to lead to … nowhere.
The mezzanine above Green Apple Books on the Park, which opened in 2014, had been empty for years, its last tenant being a tech startup (shocker). But it’s now been rechristened as the Backstory Above, a coworking office and third space geared toward writers. One of the first things you notice on the staircase is a framed photo of Le Video, the legendary video rental store that was the building’s former tenant. At the top of the stairs, you’re met by a Post-it note on the wall. It’s one of many scattered around the airy space, with prompts like “First Major Failure” or “First Memory,” with the intention that members of the space add their own notes, creating living story walls.
“The dream is that it will be eventually, this will be full of people’s stories,” co-founder Susannah Emerson told SFGATE.
The space was founded by Emerson and Paige Patterson Duff, both Master of Fine Arts graduates of Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. The pair, whose tenures there didn’t overlap, crossed paths at a reading at the store when they wondered what was going on with the upstairs space…