A New Hampshire bakery has won a crucial victory in its fight to preserve a mural of donuts and other baked goods above its storefront. While town officials have attempted to force the bakery to remove the mural, citing zoning regulations, a federal court ruled on Monday that the city cannot enforce its sign rules against the bakery.
In 2022, Sean Young, the owner of Leavitt’s Country Bakery, a popular bakery in Conway, New Hampshire, collaborated with a local high school art class to paint a mural for the bakery’s storefront. The students’ mural depicted baked goods forming the shape of a mountain range, with a multicolored sunrise in the background. Initially, the mural didn’t cause any controversy—and it was even covered positively by local media. However, about a week after being installed, Conway’s Code Enforcement Officer Jeremy Gibbs told Young that the mural violated town zoning rules.
According to the town, the mural violated local laws that regulate signs. Because the mural depicted baked goods—which the bakery obviously sells—it was deemed a “sign,” not a mural, and signs are subject to rules limiting their size. While the town’s rules define a sign incredibly broadly, in practice, the town only enforces its sign regulations on speech it perceives as commercial in nature. If Leavitt’s Country Bakery had erected a mural of just a sunrise, for example, the town would have no problem with it, even though the rules on the books would apply to both. “Imposing different burdens on speech depending on who is speaking and what is being said is content based and speaker based restriction on free speech,” reads a 2023 complaint from the Institute for Justice, a public interest law group, which represented the bakery in its lawsuit against Conway.
On Monday, a judge agreed. While the judge noted that the town’s sign rules, as written, don’t necessarily violate the Constitution, the selective nature of the town’s enforcement does. “The court rules only that Conway’s application of its sign code, and specifically its enforcement of the sign code to the Leavitt’s sign in the particular manner it employed in this case, does not withstand any level of constitutional scrutiny,” reads a ruling from District Judge Joseph N. Laplante enjoining the town from forcing Young to remove the mural. “Although the display may have violated the sign code because of its size, Gibbs’ determination was based on a rationale with no textual basis in the sign code, which does not distinguish between displays based on content.”
Hellbound and Down 