The Founders of Palm Coast: Norman Young, Alan Smolen & Jim Canfield

Most American cities don’t have founders in the literal sense. They grow up over centuries, accreting through a thousand small decisions made by thousands of unnamed people. Boundaries shift. Neighborhoods merge. Mayors come and go.

Palm Coast is different. It’s young enough — barely more than 50 years old as a community, just 26 years old as an incorporated city — that the people who built it can be named. Their decisions can be traced. Their influence is still visible in the streets, the parks, the canals, the lettered sections, and the very form of city government residents vote in today.

Three names stand above the rest: Dr. J. Norman Young, the visionary who imagined Palm Coast and laid out its master plan; Alan Smolen, the executive who shepherded the development through its most difficult adolescence; and Jim Canfield, the retired educator who organized the residents’ movement that turned a corporate development into a self-governing city.

This is the story of those three men — and how, between them, they turned 68,000 acres of pine forest, swamp, and turpentine camps into the city more than 110,000 people now call home.

Dr. J. Norman Young: The Visionary (1969–1975)

If Palm Coast has a true founding father in the conceptual sense — the person who first walked the empty pine forest of rural Flagler County and imagined a city there — it is Dr. J. Norman Young.

Young was an executive with Levitt and Sons, the legendary suburban homebuilder 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, and his company’s mass-production approach to housing reshaped the way Americans lived after World War II.

In 1968, the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) — a multinational conglomerate with annual revenues of over $7 billion — acquired Levitt and Sons as part of its aggressive corporate expansion into community development. With ITT’s enormous balance sheet behind it, the combined company began searching for a place to attempt something neither had quite tried before: not a subdivision, not a retirement village, but an entire planned city built from scratch on raw land.

Norman Young was the man chosen to lead it.

The Vision

By all accounts, Young was a true believer. In a February 1970 report to the Flagler County Chamber of Commerce, he projected that Palm Coast would have a sales/model center, a golf course, and the first occupied homes by the end of that year — all of which proved accurate. More famously, he predicted that Palm Coast would one day be home to 750,000 residents.

That number sounded absurd at the time. Flagler County’s entire population in 1970 was under 5,000. But Young’s prediction reflected the audacity of what he and his marketing group were attempting. They were not selling lots — they were selling a future city, complete with golf courses, marinas, oceanfront hotels, scenic drives, and a complete network of canals, roads, and utilities ready to support hundreds of thousands of people.

Young’s marketing group is the team that planned and named the project “Palm Coast.” A Land Sales Map dated April 7, 1970 is the earliest known document showing that name in use.

The Grand Opening

On October 29, 1970 — a date now celebrated annually as Founders Day — Norman Young presided over the grand opening of Palm Coast. Florida Governor Claude Kirk was the keynote speaker. The 64-foot observation tower at the Welcome Center was the centerpiece, surrounded by a dozen Mid-Century Modern model homes with names like Santa Rosa, DeSoto, and Delmar. Tours were conducted by air, water, and land. The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” played on loudspeakers.

Young’s tenure ran from 1969 until 1975. During those six years, he established the bones of everything Palm Coast became: the lettered section system, the master street grid, the canal network, the golf course, the I-95 interchange, and the original sales infrastructure that would eventually market more than 38,000 lots to buyers across the United States and beyond.

Long-time Palm Coast residents may not realize it, but they’re driving through Norman Young’s vision every day. Young Parkway — the original name of what is now Palm Harbor Parkway — was named in his honor. His daughter Heidi’s name was attached to “Heidi Recreation,” the original recreational management group for the development.

When Young left Palm Coast in 1975, the project was alive, occupied, and growing — but still very much a corporate development. The next chapter would belong to a man named Alan Smolen.

Alan Smolen: The Father of Palm Coast (1975–1985)

If Norman Young dreamed Palm Coast into existence, Alan Smolen made it real.

Born in Brooklyn, New York on February 12, 1920, Alan Smolen spent his entire 40-year corporate career with ITT. He served the company in roles around the world before being assigned in 1975 to take over leadership of the Community Development Corporation in Palm Coast, succeeding Norman Young as the executive in charge of building the city.

He held that position for the next decade, from 1975 to 1985 — and earned a title that has stuck with him ever since.

“The Father of Palm Coast”

In 2008, longtime Palm Coast historian Arthur E. Dycke self-published a book titled “Smolen: The Father of Palm Coast, 1975-85,” documenting Smolen’s decade of leadership during what was arguably the most critical period in the development’s history. The title was deliberate. By the time Dycke was writing, the consensus among Palm Coast’s earliest residents was clear: the dream had been Norman Young’s, but the reality had been Alan Smolen’s.

The Smolen years saw Palm Coast transform from a sparsely occupied development with a handful of pioneering families into a recognizable community of thousands. The population grew. Schools opened. Churches were built. Civic organizations formed. The Palm Harbor Golf Course matured into one of the region’s most respected courses — and in 1980, Smolen famously hosted Arnold Palmer for an exhibition there. According to former ITT senior accountant David Hayes, who was 23 at the time, Smolen instructed him to caddie for Palmer and “know the Palm Harbor Golf Course like the back of your hand.” Hayes spent two weeks playing the course every day to prepare. Palmer flew in on his private plane, played 18 holes, and gave Hayes a thumbs-up on takeoff — a memory Hayes still carries decades later.

Smolen’s tenure also coincided with significant external pressure on the Palm Coast project. The U.S. Justice Department had forced ITT to divest itself of Levitt and Sons in 1971 due to antitrust concerns, and ITT then formed its own ITT Community Development Corporation (ICDC) to continue the development under direct corporate control. Smolen took over leadership of that corporation in 1975, navigating the legal, regulatory, and financial challenges of running a 68,000-acre planned community as an arm of a multinational conglomerate.

A Quiet Legacy

Unlike Young, Smolen was not a marketer. He was an operator — the kind of executive who keeps the systems running, the budgets balanced, the lots selling, the homes being built, and the residents reasonably satisfied even as the parent corporation experiences turmoil far above his head. By all accounts, he did all of this with quiet effectiveness.

Smolen lived in Palm Coast for the rest of his life. He served on the board of directors of multiple Flagler and Volusia county organizations, including Daytona State College, which dedicated a building in his honor in April 2008. He was an active member of Temple Beth Shalom in Palm Coast.

Alan Smolen died on September 6, 2008 at Florida Hospital Flagler. He was 88. He was buried with military honors at Flagler Memorial Gardens.

When the Palm Coast Historical Society named him “The Father of Palm Coast,” they weren’t being sentimental. They were being accurate. Without Norman Young, there would have been no Palm Coast project. Without Alan Smolen, the Palm Coast project might never have made it to the 1990s — or to incorporation.

That last step required someone different entirely.

Jim Canfield: The First Mayor (1999–2007)

In the mid-1990s, ITT was changing. The conglomerate that had once functioned as something close to a private government for Palm Coast — financing the I-95 interchange, the Hammock Dunes Bridge, the water and sewer infrastructure, even much of the local civic leadership — was divesting from non-core businesses and preparing to leave. ITT formally withdrew from Palm Coast in 1995.

The void was immediate. Who would run the water company? Who would maintain the roads? Who would govern a population of more than 30,000 people that had no city government, no mayor, no city council, and no formal mechanism for collective decision-making?

The answer, ultimately, was the residents themselves. And the man who organized them was Jim Canfield.

From Staten Island to Palm Coast

James Vincent Canfield was born December 7, 1929 in Staten Island, New York. After graduating from Port Richmond High School, he joined the Marine Corps and was stationed at Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines. When his service ended, he returned to Staten Island, attended Wagner College on the GI Bill, and became a teacher. He met his first wife, Nancy Catherine Gallagher, while both were studying education. They married, settled in the Richmondtown neighborhood of Staten Island, and raised four children together.

Canfield went on to earn a doctoral degree in economic education from Ohio University and built a distinguished career in education administration with the New York City Board of Education. After retiring, he founded the Fordham Educational Leadership Program (FELP) at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus to train educators in school leadership.

After Nancy died in 1986, Canfield eventually remarried and, with his second wife Mary Ann Mortimer, moved to Palm Coast — joining several friends from Staten Island who had also relocated to the growing Florida community.

He was not planning, at age 70, to become a politician.

The Home Rule Coalition

In the late 1990s, with ITT pulling out and Palm Coast facing the question of what kind of community it would become, Canfield organized what became known as the Home Rule Coalition — a residents’ movement that pushed for incorporation as a self-governing Florida city. As chair of the Home Rule Executive Committee, he led the public conversation about what incorporation would mean, what services a city would need to provide, what the tax structure would look like, and how residents could shape their own future.

The campaign was contentious. There were vocal opposition groups within Palm Coast and Flagler County. 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. Palm Coast would become a city.

First Mayor

The election for the inaugural Palm Coast City Council followed quickly. Twenty-six candidates qualified for office, including nine running for mayor. Canfield was the top vote-getter in the primary, with 4,137 votes. In the December 14, 1999 runoff, he won 69 percent of the vote.

Two days later, on December 16, 1999, Canfield chaired the very first meeting of the Palm Coast City Council. He called Palm Coast a “Millennium City” — though it wouldn’t officially become one until December 31, 1999, the last day of the millennium and the official date of incorporation.

Canfield led the founding council with members Jim Holland, Jerry Full, Bill Venne, and Ralph Carter. Holland and Carter would each later have city parks named in their honor. Bill Venne is the only member of that founding council still living.

Canfield served as mayor through 2007, having been re-elected in 2003. During his eight years in office, Palm Coast purchased its own water company (2003), opened a new full-service hospital (Florida Hospital-Flagler, now AdventHealth Palm Coast, in 2002), approved European Village, annexed 5,800 acres in the northwest corner of the county, approved Town Center as the city’s eventual downtown, and was officially designated by the U.S. Census Bureau as the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the United States.

A Servant Leader to the End

When Canfield was term-limited out in 2007, he didn’t retire from civic life. He immediately took the leadership of the Palm Coast Historical Society and, in 2013, secured the society a permanent home at Holland Park. He made occasional public appearances after that, most notably at the 2015 ribbon-cutting for the new City Hall in Town Center.

Even his political opponents respected him. Former county commissioner Frank Liguori, who ran against Canfield in 1999, said after his death: “He never, never pulled down a partisan thing on anybody. He was always fair to everybody, and he ran meetings as they should be run. He ran them and looked upon the public as credible individuals who had to be respected.”

In 2018, Canfield moved back north to live near his daughter Eileen in Towson, Maryland, where he lived in a retirement community for the next eight years.

Jim Canfield passed away peacefully on December 26, 2025, at age 96, from pneumonia.

His ashes will be buried in Montauk, New York, on a hill overlooking the water and the sunsets, with additional remembrances scheduled in Staten Island and in Palm Coast — the city he helped build.

Three Men, Three Eras, One City

The story of Palm Coast is, in many ways, the story of these three men handing off responsibility to one another across three distinct eras.

Norman Young (1969–1975) dreamed it. He took an empty stretch of pine forest and turpentine camps and saw the bones of a future city — the canals, the streets, the lettered sections, the parks, the golf courses, the marinas. He named it. He sold it to the world. And he laid out the framework that has shaped every decision Palm Coast has made since.

Alan Smolen (1975–1985) built it. He took Young’s vision and turned it into a working community — homes occupied, schools opened, churches built, golf course matured, businesses operating, residents staying. He earned the title “Father of Palm Coast” by being the steady operator who made the dream durable through a decade of corporate change at ITT and beyond.

Jim Canfield (1995–2007) liberated it. As ITT prepared to leave, he organized the residents’ movement that allowed Palm Coast to govern itself — to become a city in the legal, civic, and democratic sense rather than just a corporate development. As the first mayor, he set the tone for everything that followed.

None of the three men was originally from Florida. Young was a corporate executive; Smolen was a Brooklyn-born ITT lifer; Canfield was a Staten Island educator. None of them looked, in 1968, like the kind of person who would build a city. And yet, between them, they did exactly that.

The pine forest that Young first walked is gone now. The corporate development that Smolen managed is now a self-governing city of more than 110,000 people. The fledgling civic experiment that Canfield helped launch in 1999 has become one of the largest cities in northeast Florida.

The city itself is the legacy. And the three men who built it — the visionary, the operator, and the organizer — are the reason any of it is here at all.