Thirty three ethnological heads ornament the keystones of the first-story windows.They were modeled on a collection related to different ethnic races, from Arab to Zulu, at the Smithsonian Institution.

Selected by Librarian Ainsworth Rand Spofford, the nine great men commemorated by the busts across the portico of the front entrance pavilion at the second-story level are each silhouetted in front of a round window. From left to right as you stand in front of the building: Demosthenes, Emerson, Irving, Goethe, Franklin, Macaulay, Hawthorne, Scott and Dante. They were carved by Herbert Adams, Jonathan Scott Hartley and Frederick W. Ruckstull.

At the very front of the building, sits King Neptune, the Roman god of the sea and the brother of Minerva, and his court in the Neptune Fountain, which was sculpted by Roland Hinton Perry.