Last week, in a building designed by McKim Mead & White, I heard Mosette Broderick, an architectural historian who’s written a book about McKim Mead & White, speak.  She debunked many myths about this legendary firm.  Apparently the partners didn’t like each other, didn’t work together, didn’t have much talent, and didn’t care about architecture.  And it was a visionary (and entirely uncredited) draughtsman at the office, James Weaver, who was responsible for the firm’s most celebrated designs.

Broderick took great pains to deflate the image of Stanford White, who might be, with the exception of Frank Lloyd Wright, the most glamorous figure in the history of American architecture.  According to Broderick, White was a promising interior designer who surrendered, in both work and life, to abject sensuality.  Still he is, like Amelia Earhart, a figure whose mythology I want to keep intact.  I’d like to believe that when he was shot to death on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden, it really was a great loss.

On Saturday I walked down Park Avenue to see Will Ryman’s giant flower sculptures “The Roses,” which are installed at the medians between 57th and 67th Streets, up close.  They bring a sense of playfulness to a neighborhood that desperately needs it, but they didn’t hold my attention for too long.  They’re more powerful as drive-by apparitions than as figures.

Far more compelling were the flowers in the window at the Valentino boutique on Madison Avenue.  The House of Valentino is doing flowers two ways.  They’re embellishing garments and accessories with fabric and leather flowers.  (Michelle Williams wore one of these lovely flowered dresses to the Golden Globe Awards last month.)  And they’re making dresses and bags with exquisite flower-printed silk.  Peering into the store, I got a sense that spring was almost here.

Terence Koh is at the Mary Boone Gallery right now performing a piece called “nothingtodoterencekoh,” in which he wears a white suit and crawls on his knees in endless clockwise circles around a giant pile of rock salt.  When I visited last week the artist’s clothes were worn from wear and he was focused but tired.  His tiny shuffling motions seemed penitential and weirdly pointless.  The monkish purity of the spectacle bothered me.

I wish that Koh had filled the gallery with salt and left it at that.  The large, low mound obstructs views and movement through the gallery, and highlights its stark geometry.  I visited late in the afternoon, when light from the roof lantern gave the mineral a shifting, glittery presence.  The physicality of this simple material put the performance to shame.

It snowed on Thursday night.  It was just a few inches, which after the weather we’ve had this season was nothing to get excited about.  Nonetheless the sidewalks the following morning were a mess and a steady rain was turning everything to slush.

So I was highly impressed to see a woman in front of me on Lexington Avenue wearing shapely grey suede peep-toe mega-heels with a short black skirt and tights.  My sense is that she knew the forecast but didn’t care.  She could have been a perfect emblem for the city: glamorous and indomitable.