When I informed Donald Trump on Thursday that I would not be writing a rave review of the ginormous sign workers are installing on his Chicago skyscraper, he had a ready reply.

"As time passes, it'll be like the Hollywood sign," he said, referring to the beloved symbol of the U.S. movie industry. In fact, Trump added, the skeptics who at first expressed revulsion at the idea of the 20-foot-6-inch-high stainless steel letters spelling "TRUMP" are coming around.

"People were saying, 'Don't put a sign up,'" Trump said. "Now, they saying, 'We love the sign.'"

My emails suggest that opinion is not universally shared. In an unsolicited note, the chief designer of Chicago's Trump International Hotel & Tower, architect Adrian Smith, wrote: "Just for the record, I had nothing to do with this sign!"

Reader Ted Naron called the sign "graffiti." He beseeched me to "use your pulpit to stop the vandalism of our cityscape currently in progress."

I've been typing sentences like that for years now, but that hasn't stopped these warts from pockmarking Chicago's renowned skyline.

It's a sign-plastered world out there, and nothing, not even Wrigley Field, is safe or sacred. When Cubs owner Tom Ricketts floated a plan last month to rim the outfield of the once-pristine ballpark with two video boards and five other signs, hardly anyone raised a red flag. Signs are so pervasive that we've become numb to them and their impact on our psyches and surroundings. Complaints are routinely dismissed as rants from the taste police.

It is hard, however, to miss Donald Trump's sign or to dismiss the anger it's provoked in some quarters. When finished, the sign will measure slightly more than 141 feet long — nearly half the length of a football field.

Not surprisingly, the developer and reality TV star, a man of no small ego, wanted the sign to be even bigger. He originally proposed that it cover 3,600 square feet, according to Peter Strazzabosco, a spokesman for the city's Department of Planning and Development. City officials cut that by roughly 20 percent, to 2,891 square feet.

As conceived by Catt Lyon Design + Wayfinding, which has a Chicago office, with details by the Poblocki Sign Co. of Milwaukee, the sign is an on-steroids version of Trump's ubiquitous logo and its bold serif typeface. Workers were installing the "M" on Thursday after spending weeks painstakingly getting the "T," "R" and "U" in place more than 200 feet above street level.

At night, Trump told me, the letters will be backlit with LED fixtures. That will be "much more subtle," he said, than conventional lighting.

Subtle? This thing? As subtle as Godzilla.

Let's come back to that.

Despite the building's enormous girth and subpar spire, Trump's 96-story hotel and condominium tower is a plus for the skyline. Architect Smith and his former firm, the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, endowed the tower with stainless steel fins that catch the light beautifully. From certain angles, like the one on Wabash Avenue looking north, it dazzles. No one expected refinement like this from the Prince of Glitz. People formed a kinship with the skyscraper — which helps explain why they now feel betrayed.

"I almost hate to walk down Wabash Avenue anymore, just to avoid seeing those giant Trump letters desecrating the building's once-proud presence," wrote one reader, who requested anonymity because he works for the city of Chicago.

The developer's bait-and-switch also grates. No renderings of the sign were evident a dozen years ago when the tower needed approval from the aesthetically fastidious Mayor Richard M. Daley. In 2012, after I criticized the proliferation of skyline commercialism in a piece sparked by a new sign atop the green glass skyscraper at 333 W. Wacker Drive, Trump said he had no plans for a sign, though he coyly added: "You may force me to do it."

On Thursday, he said: "It was always my intention to put it up."

It's bad enough, as readers are lamenting, that the sign's grotesquely overscaled letters mar the surface of an otherwise handsome skyscraper that is Chicago's second-tallest after the Willis Tower. It's worse that the sign is utterly out of character with its surroundings.

The big letters loom over the beaux arts Michigan Avenue Bridge and the great skyscrapers, from the wedding cake of the Wrigley Building to the corncobs of Marina City, that are visible from the span. To be sure, the nearby Tribune Tower has a prominently displayed sign, but it's on an attached structure, not the neo-Gothic skyscraper itself. The Trump sign, by comparison, is a poke in the eye.

The big letters also spoil the view from the Chicago Riverwalk, which Mayor Rahm Emanuel is spending millions to extend. Docents on the architectural tour boats that ply the river should tell visitors to avert their eyes.

Who greenlighted this thing? Strazzabosco, the planning department spokesman, explained in an email that large-scale signs like Trump's require support from the local alderman, plus approval by the full City Council. Ald. Brendan Reilly, in whose 42nd Ward the skyscraper is located, declined to return a phone call.

But the culprit isn't Reilly. It's a lack of sophisticated design guidelines as well as the teeth to enforce them. Trump's sign isn't the only offender — it's just the most egregious — in a city where skyline branding has run amok.

bkamin@tribune.com

Twitter @BlairKamin