Lights Up! Lynn Facility Taps into Its Jet Age History with Retro 'Turbo Town' Sign

It was a retro-cool artifact, all sleek lines and space-age gleam. The neon-lettered “Turbo Town” sign was installed at GE Aerospace’s site in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1964, with an illuminated replica of a J85 turbojet thrusting through the declaration “Birthplace of the American Jet Engine.” The nickname Turbo Town also speaks to the site’s more enduring legacy, forged when it produced the I-A, America’s first jet engine, in 1942. 

So when Site Leader John McCarron found an archival photo of the old Turbo Town sign, which was taken down sometime in the 1980s, he knew what he had to do. “It felt important to take a pause and pay homage to what we do here,” he says.

“John brought us a picture of the old sign and said, ‘What would it take to reinvent this?’” recalls Lee Spinney, director of Lynn Plant Services. Spinney asked his sometime collaborators, Philadelphia Sign Company, to take a crack at refreshing the sign. They substituted LED lights for neon and replaced the original sign’s J85 turbojet with a newer F414 engine, but otherwise reproduced the original right down to the faux neon shockwaves exiting the afterburner. The new sign was installed and lit up in time for the winter holidays.

“You see it right when you come into the new front entrance, announcing our legacy right up front,” says Spinney. “It reminds you that we’ve always been a big part of the military keeping America safe. It’s really cool to put a 2026 spin on a piece of history.”

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