Every few minutes, Nathalie Reid’s health food store in Kew Gardens, Queens, gives a shudder with bottles of kombucha and boxes of Ezekiel cereal rattling on their shelves as Long Island Rail Road trains pass below. She had paid the shaking little mind even as it seemed to grow worse every year — after all, her shop is one of 12 built along a roughly 100-year-old train overpass that is the de facto main street of this Tudor pocket of Queens.

Then she found the hole that had opened up in her storeroom.

“You could see the train tracks below,” Ms. Reid said, standing between boxes of organic soap in the back of her store, Thyme Natural Market, and on the spot where workmen had laid a plywood patch over the one-square-foot hole after it appeared a few years ago. “Through the floor in my shop!”

The bridge over the railroad tracks is Queens’s rickety answer to the store-packed Ponte Vecchio in Florence. It doubles as the hub of the bedroom community, with restaurants and stores on either side of the crossing on Lefferts Boulevard. But it is also a crumbling mess, in dire need of drastic repairs, according to the agency that owns it, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. To the dismay of the tight-knit neighborhood, the M.T.A. says that the best way to fix it is to tear the bridge down as well as the shops.