You could put a place setting on the flattop Frank Breggia was creating. How flat was it? It was pool table flat. It was so flat you could probably skip stones off it.

And the best thing about that clippered masterpiece was that you could watch it take shape in Frankie’s Barber Shop, which is on Branch Avenue in Providence. It is as it has been for a long, long time.

“The only thing changed is the new players’ pictures on the wall,” says Breggia.

The new Red Sox go up, as they must. They’ll be talked about. They should be there. But those who have carried the conversation for decades hold their place. Rocky Marciano’s picture is by the door. Could he have beaten Ali? You could probably talk about it right through the hot lather and the slap of that good smelling stuff at the end of a cut.

There are people in the chair at Frankie’s who drive a few miles to get there. They want familiar hands on the scissors. They come back to the neighborhood. They want to know they can pick up the conversation right where they left it.

“It’s a nice place, a nice barber,” says Edward Marciezyk, who lives in Cranston and brings his grandson to the shop. “You do your politics, your sports. You go to a place you like.”

There are photographs on the wall, in among the athletes and celebrities, of children getting their first haircut. They add to the sense that there is at least one place where very little changes.

The barbershop, the one that says barbershop on the window and has no play on “shear” or “clip” in its name, is high on the list of the last good places — those places between home and work where we check in and make contact and confirm a sense of where we are. There are the good bars that make it easy for the old to talk with the young. There are the small markets and hardware stores and coffee shops that have survived the scourge of the franchise and retain their own smells and their own way of delivering the goods.

And there are the barbershops like Frankie’s — and Jack’s. Jack’s Barber Shop is a couple of blocks up on the other side of Branch Avenue. It used to be a few doors away, where a big chain pharmacy is now. It stayed old when it moved. And Nick Powers keeps coming in.

“I was 5 when I first came here,” says Powers. “I’m 19 now. It’s where I’ve always come.”

He lives in Smithfield.

Anthony Cintron presides at Jack’s, where a sign on the wall among the pictures tells of boxer puppies for sale.

Cintron used to be a printer, but he wanted to be a barber. He got his license and rented a corner chair in a salon.

“It just wasn’t the right atmosphere,” he says.

He started cutting on his own, going to customers’ homes.

“Then I met Frankie. We talked. We hit it off. Now, I’m his right-hand man.”

He manages Jack’s for Breggia. The names and the years have piled up between the barber poles on Branch Avenue. And both barbers pay tribute to the men who came before them and established the shops as neighborhood sanctuaries. Hugo and Zachary Volpe did the cutting at what is now Frankie’s. They started in the ’30s and Hugo stayed with it until just a few years ago. He was 91.

And Breggia remembers the debt owed Guido Marocco, a barber he worked for before opening his own shop. There were valuable lessons passed from chair to chair.

At Jack’s, Nino Giorgianni still comes in three days a week to do what he has done for decades. He owned the shop for 40 years and Breggia says he promised him he would have a chair there for as long as he wants it.

Breggia and Cintron like the old stuff. They like the idea that they have learned things from those who came before them. You can only learn so much in barber school, says Breggia. The important stuff comes from knowing the right people.

“And Nino has taught me,” says Cintron. “He taught me the older guys, they don’t like the electric clippers. They like the scissors.”

It is the little things. It is keeping the barbershop a place to count on for more than getting your ears lowered.

“You’re almost like a psychologist, a bartender,” says Breggia. “You get called for more things than haircuts. It’s a social network. You’re often the first to hear the news in the neighborhood. There’s a lot of personal information.”

So, anything hot lately?

There might be, but it’s not going anywhere. That’s part of the deal. You get the haircut and the conversation and the assurance that what’s said in the barbershop stays in the barbershop.

bkerr@projo.com