Francis R. Kowsky
Francis R. Kowsky, FSAH, is SUNY distinguished professor emeritus at Buffalo State College. He has written numerous articles on nineteenth-century American architects, including A. J. Davis, Frederick Clarke Withers, and H. H. Richardson. Kowsky has 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 it. 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 LALH book The Best Planned City in the World: Olmsted, Vaux, and the Buffalo Park System examines the celebrated urban park plan the designers of Central Park created for Buffalo in 1868–1870 and the thirty-year association of Olmsted and his firm with that Great Lakes city. Kowsky is a former member of the New York State Board for Historic Preservation and has prepared numerous nominations for the National Register of Historic Places.