Rabbits

Visitors to Newport Beach’s Civic Center Park find a circle of white concrete rabbits that children are meant to sit on.

In February 2013 the Newport Beach Independent reported that the landscape architects, Peter Walker Partners, had added rabbit sculptures to the new civic center grounds as whimsical play elements, and that rabbits were chosen because they are so common in the area. The city manager called it “one of the children’s elements of the park”. Two rabbits stand 8 feet tall; the Independent said another 15 smaller ones, about 3 to 4 feet tall, would be placed in a ring in a meadow along Avocado Avenue south of San Miguel Drive. When ABC7 visited in December 2014 it counted 14 statues in the circle, which residents had nicknamed “Bunnyhenge”, plus the two 8-foot statues in other parts of the park, and described children running around, climbing and playing on them.