Wilcox Park is a fifteen-acre Victorian strolling park created from land and funds given in 1898 by Harriet Wilcox after Stephen Wilcox, the major benefactor of the Library, died before the Library building was completed. Harriet Wilcox gave the original seven-acre parcel, the former Rowse Babcock estate, and provided money to develop a memorial to her husband, declaring, "The people shall have a Park." The park grew through several smaller additions until 1905, when the nine-acre Hannah B.W. Brown estate was added. Its monuments include the Martha Jane Crandall Granite Urn from 1887, the Women's Monument featured at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, a Hiker Memorial to the Veterans of the Spanish American War by Allen G. Newman from 1924, the Wilcox Memorial Fountain by John Francis Paramino from 1929, the World War Memorial by Arthur A. Shurcliff from 1937, the Cristoforo Columbo Statue by Charles H. Pizzano from 1949, the Westerly Granite Industry Monument from 1985, and Margaret Wise Brown's The Runaway Bunny by Joan Binney Ross from 1998. The property has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1973.
