Hell on Color, Sweet on Song: J. Wrey Mould and the Artful Beauty of Central Park

Reveals new and previously unknown biographical material about an important figure in nineteenth-century American architecture and music.

Francis Kowsky (Author)
Francis Kowsky is SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians. For many years, he taught the history of art at Buffalo State College. He has written articles on 19th-century American architects, including A. J. Davis, Frederick Clarke Withers, and H. H. Richardson. Professor Kowsky has had a long-standing interest in the early years of the American park movement and the roles that Andrew Jackson Downing, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Calvert Vaux played in its history. The New York Times called his book Country Park and City: The Life and Architecture of Calvert Vaux ＂a handsome effort to rescue from comparative oblivion the architect who shared--sometimes more than equally--with Frederick Law Olmsted in the design of Central Park and other New York amenities.＂ His Library of American Landscape History book The Best Planned City in the World: Olmsted, Vaux and the Buffalo Park System (2013) was awarded J. B. Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies. Issued in a paperback edition in 2018, the bookexamines the celebrated urban park plan that the designers of Central Park created for Buffalo in 1868-1870 and the 30-year association that Olmsted and his firm had with that Great Lakes city. Frank has been a member of the New York State Board for Historic Preservation and has prepared numerous nominations for the National Register of Historic Places.