From Parking Lots to Towers: Watching South Park Grow Up

Apurva Pande and Samur Khouja have spent nearly two decades opening businesses, building community, and watching South Park transform around them. Between them, they’ve opened a recording studio and a cafe, helped start a school, and served on neighborhood boards, giving them a unique perspective on where South Park has been and where it could go next.

Samur has operated his recording studio, Seahorse Sound Studios, in South Park for roughly 17 years. Apurva, an architect, lived in the neighborhood with his wife and daughter for about seven years and has lived and worked throughout downtown.

They remember a very different South Park from what it is today. There were fewer buildings and far more parking lots where neighbors would play fetch with their dogs. Whole Foods wasn’t here yet. But they also remember a close-knit community, where neighbors knew one another and frequently worked together on projects in the neighborhood.

One of those efforts was a charter school that Apurva and his wife helped establish with a group of other downtown parents. When their children reached school age, the group decided to create the kind of school they wanted their kids to attend right here in downtown. Apurva remained involved until after his daughter and the other children had graduated.

Apurva met Samur through another neighborhood project. In 2015, Samur walked into a South Park BID meeting (now known as The Social District BID) with an idea for a café. He had just returned to LAX from India, changed his shirt, and headed to the meeting to make his pitch. Apurva was there as a volunteer BID board member and was immediately interested in Samur’s pitch (not just because it was a refreshing change from the usual meeting agendas about picking up trash). Apurva ended up joining the project as Samur’s business partner and designing the café.

The original idea for COW Cafe looked quite different from what exists today. Samur envisioned something closer to a smoothie bar built around three principles: community, organic food, and wellness. Put the first letters together and you get COW. The name stuck, although the partners laugh that almost no one else knows what it means.

COW has changed quite a bit from that original smoothie bar concept. Coffee became a bigger focus, and the menu evolved too. Samur’s wife, who is Turkish, helped bring Mediterranean influences to the early menu. Later, Patty joined as a partner, bringing flavors from her Salvadoran background into the kitchen, and shaping a lot of what the cafe serves. Today, the menu is an only-in-LA mix of California, Mediterranean and Salvadoran influences. Over the years, COW has also hosted yoga and supported Meals on Wheels. And they’re not done. Apurva and Samur still have ideas for events and other ways to bring neighbors together at COW.

They also have plenty of ideas about what they would like to see happen in South Park. One is bringing more activity south toward Pico, which they feel has become something of an invisible boundary within the neighborhood. They also want to see more attention paid to the streets themselves.

They have watched mature trees disappear over the years and would like to see the neighborhood restore its tree canopy and introduce more native plants. When we talked about adding more native plants, Samur immediately brought up another group that could use them: the bugs. Native plants would give insects and pollinators more habitat, something that can be hard to find in the middle of downtown.

After watching South Park change so much over the years, Apurva and Samur still want to see it grow, but without losing the close-knit community they remember from its earlier days. For them, that means thinking about more than what gets built next. It also means more trees and native plants, better sidewalks, thriving local businesses and more opportunities for neighbors to know one another.

By Michelle Morehead