The records are various materials gathered or created by the City Planning and Zoning Commission and/or Harland Bartholomew and Associates in connection with the preparation of New Orleans's first comprehensive zoning ordinance, adopted by the Commission Council on June 6, 1929. Click the image to the right to see photographs submitted with one such report.

Included are petitions, correspondence, and photographs submitted by citizens during the CPZC's public hearings on the tentative zone law; maps prepared for these hearings, for public information during the time when the tentative ordinance was under study and review, or for the use of the Commission Council during its deliberations on the ordinance; compilations of previous "piecemeal" zone ordinances; multiple drafts of the ordinance prepared for public review or for the use of the Council; newspaper copies of the proposed ordinance printed in the city's official journal; correspondence and reports produced by or for the City Planning and Zoning Commission on specific aspects of the ordinance; and stenographic records of the meetings held by the CPZC and public hearings conducted by the CPZC and the Commission Council. Original photographs included among the petitions submitted for CPCZ public hearings have been filed separately in the Municipal Government Photograph Collection. In the records, the photographs have been replaced by photocopies. Similarly, the deteriorating manilla folders in which the petitions were filed, which included detailed descriptions of the folders' contents, have also been replaced by photocopies; the original folders were discarded. Various other deteriorating labels to files or reports have also been photocopied and sometimes discarded. The folded, oversized maps included in this series are brittle and very fragile and the archivists reserve the right to limit use. Maps of the various public hearing districts prepared by the CPZC show the owners of property within districts.