Not long ago, President Trump let loose on Truth Social about his frustration with new environmental consumer-product standards—lousy water pressure in showers, weakly flushing toilets. He ordered his new E.P.A. administrator, Lee Zeldin, to tackle the problem, including overturning President Biden’s ban on most non-L.E.D. light bulbs. Earlier, he’d complained, “The bulb that we’re being forced to use, number one, to me, most importantly, the light’s no good, I always look orange.”

Might light bulbs be the rare topic on which New Yorkers and Trump agree? Maybe when it comes to the Brooklyn Bridge, which recently emerged from a multiyear effort to modernize its lighting. (The city is calling it a “glow-up.”) The result, as some unhappy neighbors and bridge-crossers will tell you: a blindingly bright bridge, its color washed out. The warm brown of John Roebling’s sooty limestone-and-granite blocks is now a millennial gray. “It’s like my 19th century Brooklyn Bridge is under interrogation by a belligerent cop,” one local posted on Instagram.

Strolling across the modified bridge just after dark recently, a Queens resident named Joe Pilato didn’t have strong opinions about the new lighting. His interest was more mercantile. The bridge’s makeover began in 2021, just before Biden’s bulb ban, when the necklace of lights dotting its swooping cables—mercury-vapor bulbs—was replaced with L.E.D.s. The city’s Department of Transportation then decided to auction off the old lighting fixtures to the public. Pilato, a professional stuff-flipper, jumped at the opportunity.

“I was regularly on a number of government-surplus websites, and on one of them I saw this post come up advertising lights from the Brooklyn Bridge,” he said. At thirty-nine, he has a scruffy beard and nearly shoulder-length hair, and he is the founder of the subreddit r/Flipping. A mechanical engineer by trade, he has spent more than a decade flipping items that people are looking to offload. As part of that process, he spends lots of time scoping out estate sales and auction houses, as well as Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. Once, he flipped some nineteenth-century harpoons that he’d found online. “I cut myself on one,” he said. “I was, like, ‘Holy shit, am I going to catch bubonic plague or something?’ ”

As he walked, Pilato passed a girl filming a TikTok dance, a bright L.E.D. ring light illuminating her face. He explained how, using a site called Public Surplus, he’d bid around thirty-five dollars each on a hundred and fifty of the hundred and seventy-six available lamps, sight unseen. He landed a hundred and twenty-three. Pilato rented a moving truck to collect his haul at a D.O.T. facility under the Williamsburg Bridge. Each fixture looks like a big gray Lego block, with a round socket holding a bulb the size of an ostrich egg encased in a thick glass globe, like a gumball machine. “When I picked them up, I was trying to get more information from the guy there about the lights, but he was very eager to show me the new L.E.D. lights,” he said. “He’s, like, ‘They’re more efficient.’ He was pretty pumped about it.”

Pilato stowed the lights in a storage facility in Sunnyside, then spent the next few days testing them, one by one, in a parking lot, plugging them into a power inverter connected to his Honda Civic. “I don’t remember the setup I used, but I was wearing safety equipment and covering my balls,” he said. “Every time I plugged one in, I was, like, ‘Is this gonna blow up?’ ” None did.

Pilato said that it took him more than a year to sell all the lights. He marketed them to history buffs and to New York-themed businesses. Once he stood at the entrance to the bridge’s pedestrian walkway for three hours, holding a sign reading “Bridge Lights for Sale.” That effort yielded nothing, but he did sell a lamp to an expatriate couple in Paris, and seventeen to the owner of a billiards parlor. Russ & Daughters, the smoked-fish store, bought a pair. One negotiation with a Long Island City bowling alley ended with him throwing in an extra light in exchange for two lanes on a Saturday night. In total, he made between twelve and thirteen thousand dollars.

Pilato dodged a cyclist and looked up to take in the new illumination. Last year, the city added fifty-six L.E.D. floodlights to the bases of the bridge’s two towers, making the effect even harsher and brighter. “I don’t think that the people in charge of the D.O.T. are, like, ‘How is this going to look aesthetically? Is this going to make people miss the way the old bridge looked?’ ” he said. “I think they were just, like, ‘L.E.D.s. Cheapest. Great. Slap them up there. Is it good visibility? Can planes still see it? Great.’ ”

“The white lights are certainly more clinical,” he went on. “I can see people being, like, ‘Bleh!’ They were warmer and cozier before.” ♦