HOLLYWOOD — The smell hits first — leather, glue and machine oil — and then the sound, a belt sander that has been running in that spot, more or less, since Eisenhower was president. The shoe-repair shop has been resoling Hollywood’s shoes for three generations, and the man at the sander is not sure how many more it has in it.

Emil Dragomir’s grandfather opened the shop in the 1950s, when a repair man could keep a family on a street full of people who owned two good pairs of shoes and expected to wear each for a decade. His father ran it next. Now Dragomir works the bench alone, a wall of half-finished shoes behind him on numbered hooks, doing a trade that fewer and fewer people think to bring him.

“People buy shoes now the way they buy coffee. Cheap, and they throw them out,” he said, not bitterly, turning a heel against the sander. “You can’t resole a shoe that was glued together to fall apart. There’s nothing under there to save. So the work changes. I fix fewer shoes, better shoes, for people who still know the difference.”

Those customers are his business now: the ones with a well-made pair worth the cost of saving, the dancers and stagehands whose feet depend on their boots, the occasional wardrobe department sending over a hero pair that has to survive a shoot. He resoles, he restitches, he rebuilds a heel from scratch when he has to. He also cuts keys and repairs handbags and does the small leather jobs that keep a slow week from being empty.

The economics are unforgiving. Rent on the corridor has climbed while the volume of repairs has fallen, and Dragomir keeps the shop going partly on the machines his grandfather bought outright and never had to finance, and partly on a stubbornness he is the first to name. His own children have careers elsewhere and no plans to take the bench. When he is asked what happens to the shop after him, he shrugs in a way that has clearly answered the question before.

There are small signs that cut the other way. A younger crowd, he said, has started bringing in boots and expensive sneakers to be resoled rather than replaced, some of them out of thrift and some out of a newfound distaste for throwing things away. It is not enough to build a business on. It is enough, some weeks, to notice.

Dragomir marked no anniversary this month and planned none. He opened at the same hour his father did, hung the day’s finished pairs on their hooks, and worked until the light in the window went. Asked how long he would keep at it, he said he would keep at it until the work or his hands ran out, and that so far both were holding, and that this was as much of a plan as the shop had ever needed.