Most American cities are built by people. Farmers settle a river valley. Merchants set up shop along a railroad. Families raise children, who raise families, who raise more families, and over generations a community takes shape around schools, churches, town halls, and main streets.
Palm Coast wasn’t built like that. Palm Coast was built by a corporation.
From 1969 to 1995, the city’s founding, infrastructure, services, leadership, marketing, and most of its civic life were the responsibility of one entity: International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, better known as ITT. For more than a quarter of a century, ITT functioned as something close to a private government for a community of tens of thousands of residents. The company built the roads, ran the water and sewer system, paid for the I-95 interchange, financed the Hammock Dunes Bridge, and provided most of the leadership that an incorporated city would normally provide. This unique arrangement is a key component in the history of ITT and Palm Coast.
Then, in 1995, ITT walked away. Four years later, the residents voted to govern themselves, and Palm Coast became a city in the legal sense for the first time.
This is the story of how that all happened.
What ITT Was
To understand the Palm Coast story, you have to understand what ITT was at the time it arrived in Flagler County.
In 1968, ITT was one of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world. Originally founded in 1920 as a Caribbean and South American telephone company, ITT had grown by mid-century into a sprawling multinational conglomerate with operations on six continents. By the late 1960s, under the aggressive leadership of CEO Harold Geneen, the company had acquired hundreds of subsidiaries in industries ranging from telecommunications to insurance to hotels to bakeries to car rental services.
By 1968, ITT’s annual revenues were estimated at over $7 billion. The company had the financial muscle to do almost anything it wanted to do.
What it wanted to do, increasingly, was build communities.
The Levitt Acquisition
In 1968, ITT acquired Levitt and Sons, the legendary suburban homebuilding firm founded in 1929 by Abraham Levitt and made famous by his son William Levitt for the post-WWII Levittowns of New York and Pennsylvania. William Levitt is widely considered the father of modern American suburbia. His company’s mass-production approach to housing reshaped the way Americans lived after World War II.
The combination of ITT’s balance sheet and Levitt’s homebuilding expertise opened a new possibility. The two companies, working together, could attempt something neither had quite tried before. Not a subdivision. Not a retirement village. An entire planned city, built from scratch on raw land.
They began looking for a place to do it.
Why Flagler County
Flagler County in the late 1960s was a quiet rural place. The total population in 1969 was around 4,500 people. The economy was driven by cattle, citrus, potato farming, timber, and turpentine. There were a handful of small towns, including Bunnell as the county seat, Flagler Beach on the coast, and smaller settlements like Espanola, Bulow, and Korona scattered across the interior.
The land was cheap. The terrain was workable. The location, between St. Augustine to the north and Daytona Beach to the south, was attractive. Major transportation corridors, including U.S. 1, State Road A1A, and the future I-95, ran through or near the area. The Atlantic Ocean was on the east side, the Intracoastal Waterway provided protected boating access, and the climate was mild year-round.
For ITT, it was the right combination of cheap raw material and good infrastructure potential. The company began assembling land.
The Land Acquisition
ITT formed ten subsidiary companies for the express purpose of purchasing land in Flagler County. Acting through these subsidiaries, the company quietly bought up parcels from 35 separate owners between 1968 and 1969, eventually assembling roughly 68,000 acres. Major sellers included ITT Rayonier Corporation, Wadsworth Land Company, and the old Lehigh Portland Cement Company property on what is today Colbert Lane.
The Lehigh Cement plant deal was the first to close. The deed for the purchase was recorded in Flagler County on December 23, 1968. Two weeks later, on January 2, 1969, the Flagler Tribune ran the first public announcement of the cement plant sale. The Palm Coast project was beginning.
On June 16, 1969, ITT held a press event at the historic Princess Place to formally announce its plans. The company would build a 20,000-acre residential complex featuring waterfront lots, an oceanfront hotel, a golf course, marinas, and a 500-mile network of roads, utilities, and drainage. Levitt’s project manager, Dr. J. Norman Young, predicted the new community would eventually be home to 750,000 residents.
That number was, to put it generously, ambitious. Flagler County’s entire population at the time was under 5,000.
ITT/Levitt and the Original Setup
For the first few years, the Palm Coast project operated under the joint banner of ITT and Levitt and Sons. Marketing materials referenced both names. Construction crews worked under both names. The combined company even established offices in the old Lehigh cement plant.
A few key milestones came in rapid succession:
- In 1969, Atlantic Development Corporation was formed under ITT/Levitt to provide water and wastewater service to Palm Coast. This subsidiary would eventually become Florida Water Services and operate the Palm Coast utility system for decades.
- In 1970, construction began on the main canal connecting Palm Coast to the Intracoastal Waterway. A Land Sales Map dated April 7, 1970 is the earliest surviving document showing the development had been formally named “Palm Coast.”
- On October 29, 1970, the grand opening of Palm Coast was held. Florida Governor Claude Kirk was the keynote speaker. The 64-foot observation tower at the Welcome Center was the centerpiece. The day is now annually celebrated as Founders Day.
- In 1971, the first nine holes of the Palm Harbor Golf Course opened to the public. The number of home site purchasers more than tripled, from 2,500 to over 8,000.
- In January 1972, the first Palm Coast residents, called “pioneers” by ITT marketing materials, moved into homes on the corner of Club House Drive and Casper Drive in the C section. Casper Drive was the first road built in Palm Coast.
- Also in 1972, ITT opened the Palm Coast Yacht Club, now the Palm Coast Resort, as a community gathering point with a marina, pool, tennis courts, and restaurant.
The Antitrust Problem
The ITT/Levitt partnership was short-lived. In 1971, the U.S. Justice Department forced ITT to divest itself of Levitt and Sons because of antitrust concerns related to the broader ITT conglomerate’s market dominance across multiple industries. Levitt and Sons remained an ITT subsidiary in name through 1972, then operated under various restructured arrangements before being sold off entirely to Starrett Housing Corp. in 1979.
For Palm Coast, the divestiture was a structural challenge but not a practical one. ITT immediately formed a new subsidiary, the ITT Community Development Corporation (ICDC), to continue the development under direct corporate control. ICDC took over operations in 1971 and would run Palm Coast for the next two decades.
Norman Young remained at the helm of the development through 1975. When he left, leadership passed to Alan Smolen, a long-time ITT executive who would run ICDC’s Palm Coast operations from 1975 to 1985.
ITT as Government
For most of the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, ITT functioned in Palm Coast as something close to a private government.
This wasn’t an accident or an emergency arrangement. It was the model. Palm Coast was an unincorporated population center in a rural county that lacked the resources to provide municipal-level services. Flagler County in 1980 still had only about 10,000 residents countywide, and the county government was small, agricultural, and oriented toward serving Bunnell and the rural interior, not a rapidly growing planned community on the east side of I-95.
ITT filled the gap. The corporation:
- Built and maintained the roads inside the development
- Ran the water and sewer utilities through Atlantic Development Corporation, later Florida Water Services
- Operated parks, golf courses, marinas, and recreational facilities
- Provided community management and homeowner services
- Funded major infrastructure projects out of corporate budgets
- Maintained the marketing and sales operation that brought in new residents
- Published the Palm Coaster newsletter to keep residents informed
In a unique private/government relationship, ITT financed Palm Coast’s most necessary improvements at a cost barely visible to local taxpayers. The Hammock Dunes Bridge, which connects mainland Palm Coast to the barrier island and Hammock Dunes, opened in 1988 as an ITT-funded project. The I-95 interchange at Palm Coast Parkway, which made the city accessible to interstate traffic, opened in 1991, also funded substantially through ITT.
For residents, the arrangement was mostly invisible. They paid their water bills to Atlantic Development Corporation. They paid their property taxes to Flagler County. They drove on roads maintained by ITT crews. They voted in county elections, but had no local government of their own.
It worked, for a while.
The Marketing Machine
One of the things ITT did better than almost anyone in the planned-community business was marketing. The Palm Coast sales operation was aggressive, professional, and aimed squarely at retirees and middle-class families in the Northeast and Midwest.
ITT used television commercials, print advertisements, direct mail campaigns, and fly-in tours to bring prospective buyers to Flagler County. The Welcome Center on Clubhouse Drive served as the front door, with model homes, a golf course, and the iconic 64-foot observation tower offering panoramic views of the surrounding development. Sales agents pitched the dream of affordable Florida sunshine, waterfront lots, and a future city built around the buyer’s home.
The marketing worked. By 1975, ITT had sold more than 38,000 lots, mostly to out-of-state buyers from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Ohio, and other Northeastern and Midwestern states. Many of those buyers held their lots as investments. Others built homes and moved south. By the late 1970s, the population of Palm Coast had grown into the thousands, and by 1990 it had reached 18,556.
The pace of growth was driven almost entirely by the corporate sales engine, not by organic settlement.
The Beginning of the End
By the 1980s, ITT was changing as a company. CEO Harold Geneen had retired in 1977. His successor, Rand Araskog, began the long process of reshaping ITT from a sprawling conglomerate into a more focused corporation. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, ITT divested from many of its non-core businesses, including community development.
The strategic logic was clear. Running a Florida planned community was not central to ITT’s long-term identity. The Palm Coast project had achieved most of what it was originally designed to do. The land had been sold. The infrastructure was in place. The community was self-sustaining in most practical respects. There was no compelling reason for a multinational telecommunications and industrial conglomerate to keep operating a Florida city.
ITT formally withdrew from Palm Coast in 1995. The company’s remaining real estate assets were purchased by Lowe Enterprises, a Los Angeles-based real estate firm, which took over the marketing and sale of the remaining ITT inventory. Atlantic Development Corporation, the water and sewer utility, was eventually sold off, first to Allete in 1996 and then ultimately to the City of Palm Coast in 2003.
The massive ITT headquarters building at 1 Corporate Drive, where much of the corporate work of running Palm Coast had been done, was eventually sold to the Flagler County school district for office and adult education space. It was demolished in 2016, more than 20 years after ITT’s withdrawal.
The Vacuum
ITT’s exit created a real problem. For 26 years, the corporation had functioned as an informal local government for tens of thousands of residents. When ITT left, that role didn’t transfer to anyone automatically.
Who would maintain the roads? Who would run the water company? Who would provide community management? Who would speak for Palm Coast at the county and state level?
The Flagler County government couldn’t easily step in. The county was being asked to provide municipal-level services to a population center that had outgrown the county’s capacity. Palm Coast’s population by the mid-1990s was roughly 25,000 to 30,000, larger than Bunnell, larger than Flagler Beach, larger than every other community in the county combined.
Something had to give. The community needed a city government.
Incorporation
The push for incorporation began almost immediately after ITT’s withdrawal. A residents’ movement, led by retired educator Jim Canfield and organized as the Home Rule Coalition, made the case that Palm Coast should govern itself.
The campaign was contentious. There were vocal opposition groups within Palm Coast and Flagler County who feared higher taxes, additional bureaucracy, and loss of the relatively low-key arrangement that had existed under ITT. The county authorized a feasibility study. The state legislative delegation sponsored incorporation legislation. The Florida state government approved the referendum.
The vote was originally scheduled for September 14, 1999. Hurricane Floyd forced a one-week postponement. When residents finally went to the polls on September 21, 1999, 6,994 voters (60 percent) approved incorporation; 4,591 (40 percent) opposed it.
The official incorporation date was December 31, 1999, the last day of the millennium. Jim Canfield was elected Palm Coast’s first mayor. On October 1, 2000, all services were officially transferred from the former Palm Coast Service District to the new city government.
For the first time in its 30-year history, Palm Coast was governing itself.
What ITT Left Behind
The ITT era of Palm Coast ended in 1995. But the bones of the city ITT built are still everywhere if you know what to look for.
- The lettered section system, where every street in a neighborhood starts with the same letter, was an ITT marketing and planning tool.
- The wide medianed parkways, named for old plantation grades like Palm Coast Parkway (formerly the St. Joe Grade) and Old Kings Road, were laid out by ITT engineers.
- The 70-plus miles of saltwater and freshwater canals were dug by ITT contractors, mostly in the early 1970s.
- The Palm Harbor Golf Course was an ITT/Levitt project from 1971.
- The original water and sewer infrastructure was built by ITT subsidiaries.
- The Hammock Dunes Bridge was an ITT-funded infrastructure project.
- The I-95 interchange that opens Palm Coast to the broader world was substantially financed by ITT.
- European Village, Town Center, and the Hammock Dunes development all sit on land that was originally part of the ITT/Levitt master plan.
- Many of the city’s earliest neighborhoods, including the C section where the first pioneers moved in, were laid out by ITT planners.
The 64-foot observation tower from the 1970 grand opening is gone. The original ITT Welcome Center is gone. The massive ITT headquarters building at 1 Corporate Drive is gone. But the framework those buildings represented, the 1969 vision of a city built from scratch on raw Florida land, still defines almost every aspect of how Palm Coast functions in 2026.
The Verdict on the ITT Era
Half a century later, opinions on the ITT era of Palm Coast are mixed but mostly favorable.
The corporation built infrastructure that smaller developers could never have built. It financed bridges, interchanges, utilities, and amenities that most Florida planned communities lack to this day. It marketed Palm Coast aggressively enough to populate a city of tens of thousands of people in just a few decades. It maintained a level of community management that most unincorporated areas would envy.
There are also legitimate criticisms. The early Palm Coast development was, like most Levitt projects of the era, originally designed for white residents only. It was not formally integrated until 1974, when ITT allowed an engineer with a Jamaican wife to move into the community. Some of the marketing claims, especially around predicted population growth and the “completed” nature of the infrastructure, oversold what was actually being delivered. The corporation’s withdrawal in 1995 left the community scrambling to replace services that had been delivered, in some cases, for free.
On balance, though, ITT did something genuinely unusual in American urban history: it built a city. The vast majority of American cities developed slowly, organically, over generations. Palm Coast was conceived in a corporate boardroom in 1968, opened to the public in 1970, populated through aggressive sales over the next twenty years, and handed off to its residents in 1999.
That such a place could be built at all is a testament to the resources of a multinational conglomerate at the height of its 1960s power. That the place is still there, still growing, and still functioning more than half a century later, is a testament to everything the residents have done since ITT left.
The corporation built the bones. The people made the city.
