Metro

Ansonia resident battles to keep neon peace sign she displays from her apt. window

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LANDMARK DECISION: The city is trying to snuff Ansonia resident Brigitte Vosse’s illuminated peace sign. (
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This Upper West Sider is going to war for her peace symbol.

Brigitte Vosse, 58, has been irking neighbors for more than a year with her own personal protest against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: a neon peace sign hanging in her living-room window at the Ansonia, a beloved, Beaux-Art style Broadway building once home to Babe Ruth.

Vosse’s living room happens to inhabit one of the iconic structure’s turrets, giving her peace symbol a prominent place in the neighborhood, and prompting enough complaints to spark a city crackdown on her pacifist message.

A September 2011 fine from the city did nothing to faze the clothing designer, who works out of her 16th-floor apartment.

The city claims the peace symbol violates zoning laws requiring signs in commercial districts be no higher than 40 feet above the curb.

But the city has overstepped its bounds by trying to muzzle her right to free speech, Vosse argued at an Environmental Control Board hearing in April.

The ECB sided with the city, saying it couldn’t rule on the question of free speech and ordering Vosse to pay an $800 fine and remove the symbol.

She paid up but refused to remove her glowing symbol, which hangs from two hooks wired into the window’s wooden frame. And she’s now taking her case to federal court.

The head of the Brigitte NYC boutique filed suit last week in Manhattan federal court, seeking an injunction to keep the city from coming after her.

The peace symbol is Vosse’s way of saying that “we all need peace in this world, and that everyone can be united,” according to court papers, which defend the illuminated sign as an expression of Vosse’s “opposition to war as a solution to human problems — including my disagreement with American military policies with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The city’s zoning rules “effectively ban political signs and symbols placed in windows of residential homes,” she claims.

The rules should be tossed, Vosse insists, because otherwise, her “political speech will be unconstitutionally banned, censored and subject to continuing unconstitutional prior restraints.”