The City of Boston values aesthetics more than free speech.

That seemed to be the essence of a key city witness’s testimony at the news-box trial in Federal District Court on Monday. At issue is whether the Back Bay Architectural Commission’s ban of news boxes — which many publications, including this one, use to distribute their newspapers and magazines in the neighborhood — violates the First Amendment. Representatives of plaintiffs Editorial Humor, the Improper Bostonian, and the Weekly Dig underwent hectoring questioning by city attorney David Breen; then William Young, a senior preservation planner with the city and the executive secretary of the Back Bay Architectural Commission (BBAC), took the stand to testify in the ban’s favor.

"The removal of the news racks will immediately improve the visual quality of the district," said Young, which "would relieve the quality of clutter that news boxes produce." He added that the boxes "compete visually with the architecture that makes up the district."

How terribly untidy! Young, the city bureaucrats, and the BBAC members must envy such "axis of evil" locales as North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, where they don’t have any ugly news boxes to obscure the architecture of presidential palaces and grandiose monuments.

All publications that circulate in the Back Bay agree that the architectural integrity of residential streets should be preserved, and they no longer locate boxes there. Commercial thoroughfares, like heavily trafficked Newbury and Boylston Streets, already accommodate a degree of the urban (albeit refined) clutter associated with modern city living. And the city’s major publications — paid and free — has already agreed to limit the placement of their news boxes to such commercial areas.

The news-box ban — which could result in putting some publications, such as Editorial Humor, out of business — has drawn the attention of free-speech groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union. US District Court judge Douglas Woodlock will decide whether the city’s aesthetic concerns outweigh free-speech arguments.

"From our perspective, we think the balance has to take into account the importance of free speech in a democratic society," says John Reinstein, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts.

The judge postponed the trial until April 5.