Correspondence, memos, legal documents, and other materials documenting the projects and concerns of the Office of Urban Conservation. A large portion of the materials address the controversy over what to do with Fort Lawton. The Parks Department and open-space advocates wanted to demolish the buildings left from the army fort, while preservationists wished to save at least some of them. Planning and negotiation about what became Discovery Park went on for years, finally resulting in the preservation of the most significant buildings.

Another topic addressed in some depth is the preservation of historic religious properties. The city tried to declare both First Covenant Church and First United Methodist Church as historic landmarks, but the churches fought the designations in court on constitutional grounds and won. There is a great deal of documentation of these two cases, as well as material from other relevant cases around the country, documentation of historic religious properties in the city, and files relating to a Seattle conference on religious properties.

Other subjects documented in the collection include the Frederick & Nelson site, preservation surveys, the downtown plan, Seattle Commons, and Preservation Week activities.