A line stretches out the door of the Coop during lunch and dinner. With only two employees — owners Mike and Christina Fransen — orders on a busy night can take up to an hour to prepare, but regulars don’t mind. For over 50 years, the 440-square-foot, standing-room-only pizza joint has sat largely unchanged on the corner of Exposition and National in Palms, surrounded by dingbat apartment buildings, traffic from the I-10, and an elevated train platform. Beloved for its New York-style slices that are thin, oily, crispy, and the ideal quick bite before catching the Metro E train across the street, the classic pizzeria is filled with the aroma of freshly baked bread, bubbling cheese, and stewed tomatoes.

Customers lean against the Coop’s large windows or run into Bob’s Market around the corner to pass the time before their orders are ready. “You’re never not entertained by the owners,” says one of the Coop’s regulars, who lives in the neighborhood. “She calls everybody ‘sweetheart,’ ‘sweetie,’ or ‘honey.’ Everybody feels like a regular even if they aren’t.” Christina is famous for handing out terms of endearment like the little Parmesan packets that come with each pizza.

The Fransens met about 30 years ago at the Coop. At the time, Christina was a full-time teacher who worked the register on weekends to make ends meet. Mike grew up across the street from the restaurant and transitioned from customer to employee in his early 20s when the delivery driver called out sick — Mike took his shift and never left. Mike and Christina were friends who connected over similarly turbulent childhoods at first, but eventually, the opposites — Christina lived all over before settling in Los Angeles, while Mike had stayed close to the same three-square-mile radius since birth — began dating and married 12 years ago.

In the early 1960s, the Coop was part of a short-lived chain of restaurants serving roasted chicken, ribs, and shrimp out of the tiny kitchen packed with fryers until it went out of business in 1968. Italian immigrants Maria and Guido Cuomo moved to Palms with their four children at that time, took over the space, and turned it into a takeout-only Italian restaurant under the same name. The Cuomos left the business to their children when they retired in 1982, and the second-generation owners put the restaurant on the market in 1998.

Mike, who had been employed at the Coop for nine years at this time, knew the ins and outs of the business and purchased it from the younger Cuomos. Maria Cuomo, the family’s widowed matriarch, continues to visit the Coop to share a slice and catch up with the Fransens. The Cuomo children swing by when they are in town, too.

The Fransens learned everything from the Cuomos when it comes to the food. A day at the Coop starts at 10 a.m. With no space to fit a freezer inside the tiny restaurant, the pizza dough and marinara sauce are made fresh daily. The shop’s marinara that gets ladled over pasta and onto pizza calls for whole Roma tomatoes, while the olive oil-laced pizza dough uses two types of flour. The whole milk Buffalo mozzarella atop the pizzas comes directly from Wisconsin. The Coop’s supremely satisfying slices of cheese pizza go for just $3.50, or 75 cents more for pepperoni-topped slices. Each individual serving is crisped in the oven, wrapped in foil, and served on paper plates.

Aside from pizza, the Coop’s menu includes carefully layered lasagnas, thick meatball sandwiches flecked with fresh Italian parsley, and dinner plates of chicken Parm or a vegetarian version made with thinly sliced and flash-fried skinless eggplant. Every dish is listed prominently on a large plastic red-and-green menu stuck to the wall. While some of the Coop’s recipes have been adapted over time, including the deep dish pizza, most of them have stayed unchanged to meet customers’ expectations.

The Fransens are devoted to the Coop’s customers, who often, to them, feel like family. “Many are local that have been coming for years,” says Christina. Some even worked for the original chicken restaurant, she says. For the Coop’s most loyal crowd, the folks who live in the one-story houses and apartment buildings in the area, Mike has committed their phone numbers and orders to memory. The Coop’s other frequent diners include tourists stepping off the train, UCLA college students, film industry types from nearby Sony Studios, and wealthier Angelenos who live up the street in Cheviot Hills.

Mike remembers the Palms of his childhood as a transitory neighborhood for families living in starter homes. “Now, it’s all apartments and maybe one house on each block,” he says. “It’s good for a small business because of the population density.”

Palms and nearby Culver City have seen an uptick in property development with mixed-use buildings bringing in more restaurant offerings in recent years. “There used to be fewer choices,” says Christina. “Now that people can walk to all those places, I think we lost a lot of the lunch crowd.” The changes began with the Metro E Line extension that opened in 2016. While the train brought in some new clientele, it also increased instances of crime in the area, Christina says. Signage for the Coop can be spotted from the elevated train platform at Palms station.

Major streaming companies are among the tenants of new developments in Culver City, including Apple, Max, and Amazon. High-end malls like the Platform have also popped up to service the new lunch crowd with popular chains like Sweetgreen and Blue Bottle. While the emergence of mixed-use verticals in and around Palms is seen as a boon to the local economy, they are also contributing to higher rents and the displacement of legacy businesses, like the 50-year-old recently shuttered Overland Cafe.

The Fransens, who live three miles from the Coop, understand that the new developments are not going anywhere, so instead they focus on being active members of their communities, especially when it comes to making pizzas for kids’ birthday parties and other special occasions. Their neighbors help them in return, like when a pipe recently burst and the couple called one of their regulars to assist. “That’s the sweet part about the Coop,” says Christina.

Christina hopes the Coop stays open for another five to 10 years. She wants to fix the place up, hire a few new employees, and invest in a card reader (the Coop is currently cash-only) — if she can convince Mike. “I’m just gonna keep paddling. I really can’t see a future other than just one day at a time,” he says.

Though it is unclear what the future will hold, it’s still all about the locals who dine at the Coop day in and day out. “What makes it New York-style is not the thin crust. It’s the community built around the restaurant,” she says.

The Coop is located at 10006 National Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90034, and is open from Wednesday to Thursday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Saturday from 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.