During the last half dozen years it has materialized almost like a mirage, levitating above more than a dozen gritty acres of working rail tracks on the Far West Side.

You can see it on the skyline or along the Hudson River, upending Manhattan’s silhouette.

The first massive tower emerged at the apex of the High Line, looming over it, a shingled, spiky, reflective blue-glass behemoth, shaped by eccentric cuts and angles, as if sheared by a giant Ginsu knife.

Since then, at jaw-dropping magnitudes you can’t begin to grasp until you are actually standing there, Hudson Yards has sprouted a seven-story, 720,000-square-foot shopping mall. There are also four more supertall skyscrapers as well as a $500 million city-sponsored arts center called the Shed, featuring a giant sliding roof, eye-catchingly swathed in a tufted Teflon-based sheeting that can bring to mind inflated dry cleaning bags.

And, well, what can I call it?

It is temporarily called the Vessel. Hoping for public buy-in, its patron, the lead developer of this vast neoliberal Zion, has invited suggestions for a new name.

Purportedly inspired by ancient Indian stepwells (it’s about as much like them as Skull Mountain at Six Flags Great Adventure is like Chichen Itza) the object — I hesitate to call this a sculpture — is a 150-foot-high, $200 million, latticed, waste-basket-shaped stairway to nowhere, sheathed in a gaudy, copper-cladded steel.

It preens along the critical axis between the High Line and the newish No. 7 subway station at Hudson Yards, hoping to drum up Instagram views and foot traffic for the mall, casting egregious shadows over what passes for public open space, ruinously manspreading beside the Shed, the most novel work of architecture on site, and the only building the private developers didn’t build.

Emily Rhyne

New York politics and real estate are notoriously akin to “Rashomon.” Any verdict on an undertaking as costly and complex as Hudson Yards depends on one’s perspective.

For its advocates, the $25 billion development is a shining new city ex nihilo, a wellspring of future tax revenues and evidence of a miraculous, post-9/11 civic volte-face. They note how the project sailed through the public and environmental review processes, winning neighborhood approval partly because at the time it seemed better than an earlier proposal to erect a sports stadium on the site, partly because it was conceived when New York still feared for its economic future and lagged, in terms of Grade A office space, behind global competitors like London.

As a feat of engineering, it rests on a new $1 billion platform, which decks over a stretch of infrastructure that for generations acted as a kind of Nowhereland on the West Side. Nowhereland is now making way for what promises to be 16 new buildings, including some 4,000 new apartments, a school, parkland and upward of 55,000 jobs. Slightly more than 10 percent of those apartments will be subsidized housing (some 430 apartments), with more such housing underway or already built by the developers off site — 1,309 subsidized apartments in total.

Now occupying the eastern end of the rail yards, the project will ultimately cover 28 acres when the western half is finished — an undertaking that has preoccupied two of the world’s largest private real estate developers, Related Companies, led by its chairman, Stephen M. Ross, and Oxford Properties Group.

The rail yards before development, with Penn Station and Madison Square Garden behind. Mark Lennihan/Associated Press

Already, a who’s who of blue-chip hedge funds, law firms and other corporations — SAP, KKR, BlackRock, Wells Fargo, L’Oréal USA, the list goes on — have chosen to move in or will do, when yet another giant office tower, now underway, is completed. WarnerMedia and CNN are migrating from the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, Related’s earlier high-end, mixed-use, mall-centered venture. Star chefs, including Thomas Keller and David Chang (also Columbus Circle tenants), will run restaurants at Hudson Yards, where Neiman Marcus, Cartier, Dior, Gucci, Fendi and more of the usual suspects hope to defy obvious retail trends.

Not yet joining the caravan are companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook. Related’s antiseptic, inward-turning, glass-tower formula doesn’t seem to speak to the tastes of cutting edge industries or younger, urban-minded millennials.

Ninety percent of Hudson Yards’ office tenants, according to a recent study by the New School, are also transfers from Midtown, lured by lucrative tax breaks provided by New York politicians to the developers. Moving from Midtown, the investment company BlackRock, which manages $5.98 trillion, will be able to write off $25 million in state tax credits if it adds 700 jobs at Hudson Yards.

The terms du jour are corporate welfare or socialism for billionaires. City officials sold Hudson Yards to New Yorkers as a self-financing venture. That’s not what it may sound like. The city and state provided tax incentives and poured billions of public dollars into an extension of the No. 7 subway line and into acres of open space around the yards — investments presumably benefiting everyone, which the project is supposed to pay back by increasing New York’s GDP.

We’ll see how and when that happens. As the New School study documents, so far the project is shifting economic development from other neighborhoods to Hudson Yards without creating new net growth.

That said, this shift has spurred more developers to build their own mega-towers near the yards. A new place is emerging.

The question is, what sort of place?