The point was structural integrity: if one of the closely spaced steel bones failed, another would be there to take up the slack, avoiding a total collapse.
From the highest ridge of the memorial, you can look out not only to the steel bones and glass skin of Jersey City rising against the sky but to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, too.
Enveloped in white plastic sheathing, set atop small wooden blocks, the immense steel bones of the World Trade Center lie under the gray winter sky on a patch of the Kennedy Airport tarmac where the jets never venture.
That evening she took our boys, then 8 and 13, to a candlelight vigil for our neighborhood firefighters who were lost in the crushed steel bones of those towers.
"The traditional corsets have steel boning in them - they 'knee in the back' and have a proper lace up - but technical development has meant other corsets still have the waist-nipping beautiful contouring, but garments are more comfortable.
In spite of it all, they remain standing, concrete eroded by wind and dust, revealing the rusted steel bones beneath, flanking a three-story tall replica of the Last Supper.
