The players in the dispute have added a cultural element to one of the thousands of eviction cases in New York each year. In this case, Ms. Sarno’s two-bedroom unit could fetch five times the current rent in an area that, like many in the city, has become lucrative territory.

Ms. Sarno, whose only child, a daughter, lives in Wisconsin, wants to stay in the neighborhood where she was born by midwife. Her family, including two brothers, a sister and her parents, who eventually separated, all lived in Little Italy. She said she had moved to her current second-floor apartment, where her father was living, after her divorce in the 1960s.

Not much is left of Ms. Sarno’s Little Italy, now mostly a tourist magnet of a few blocks that has been overwhelmed by Chinatown’s sprawl. The 2010 census recorded not one neighborhood resident who had been born in Italy.

“My good friends all passed away,” she said. “I’ve got my television.”

She still counts on a few friends: the owner of the gun shop next door who takes out her garbage; the young couple upstairs who have a baby and pay $4,500 a month; an old boyfriend who drives her to a ShopRite on Staten Island to save on groceries.

Her doctors and the parish where she was baptized, Church of Most Precious Blood, founded in the late 1800s, remain within walking distance.