CONCORD, N.H. — A New Hampshire bakery owner testified Friday that his excitement about displaying a painting by high school students of giant pastries quickly turned to annoyance after a zoning code officer told him it was a sign and had to be changed or removed.
Sean Young said the the work atop his bakery is art, and was never intended to be a sign.
“I was artistically offended for the students,” said Young, who’s suing the town of Conway because he says it violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.
“It’s offensive to move it,” he said in court Friday. “I just didn’t want to do it.”
The bright painting atop Leavitt’s Country Bakery shows sunbeams shining down on a mountain range made of sprinkle-covered chocolate and strawberry doughnuts, a blueberry muffin, a cinnamon roll and other pastries.
A federal judge is considering whether the town is infringing on Young’s rights. For now, the painting has been allowed to remain since it was first displayed in June 2022.
The zoning board determined the painting is not so much art as advertising.
If it didn’t show what’s sold inside — baked goods — it wouldn’t be considered a sign and could stay, board members said. But because of its size, they say it can’t remain as-is. At about 90 square feet (8.6 square meters), it’s four times bigger than the local sign code allows.
Jeremy Gibbs, the zoning officer who issued the citation, testified that he was following the town’s definition of a sign, which some lawyers and even the judge remarked seemed to cover “everything.”
A sign in Conway is “any device, fixture, placard, structure or attachment thereto that uses color, form, graphic, illumination, symbol, or writing to advertise, announce the purpose of, or identify the purpose of any person or entity, or to communicate information of any kind to the public, whether commercial or noncommercial,” according to the sign code.
Gibbs testified that if there were no regulation, then signs could be placed anywhere and there could be safety concerns about lighting or distracted drivers. He also noted that Conway, near the White Mountains, draws tourists to its natural resources.
If signage was unregulated, he said, “we could lose a lot of that beauty.”
U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante couldn’t resist adding a bit of levity to the proceeding.
“It’s shocking that no one brought doughnuts to this trial,” he said at one point.
During another moment, he asked Young to describe each pastry in the painting, starting with a scone on the left. He quibbled over Young’s description that a raspberry cookie was actually the top of a cupcake.
