LOUIS SAVARESE, the son and grandson of butchers, was raised to know the difference between a rib-eye roast and a cross-rib roast, but he is the first in his family to appreciate the finer points of cow hooves and chicken feet.

The Savarese family has run Michael’s Prime Meats on Nostrand Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn, since 1931. As the neighborhood changed from a mix of Irish, Jewish and Italian families to a solidly Caribbean enclave, the fare has changed as well.

“Forty years ago, we wouldn’t have a cow foot,” Mr. Savarese said, pointing to a bucket of them. Goat meat, oxtail, Jamaican curry powder — these are the gradual changes that have allowed Michael’s to stay open as so many of its neighbors have closed to make way for wig stores and West Indian bakeries.

“We’re the last one,” Mr. Savarese said, slicing into a side of beef.

In a city where Jewish neighborhoods turn Puerto Rican, then African and then something else, Mr. Savarese belongs to the sparse ranks of holdouts who have held firm amid the city’s churn, even as newcomers have remade the streets around them. They dig in for many reasons: love of place, loyalty, optimism or sheer stubbornness. Nostalgia grounds some, inertia others. But all of them can still imagine, as they look out on their reshaped blocks, the neighbors and businesses that left decades ago.