The New Yorker:

When the bridge went L.E.D., an entrepreneurial stuff-flipper bought a bunch of the old lights, for thirty-five dollars a pop.

By Diego Lasarte

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.

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