This movie illustrates the long-term urban spatial development of 35 selected U.S. cities, at unprecedented spatial detail, over a time period of 200 years. The underlying data are gridded geospatial surfaces contained in the Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the United States (HISDAC-US), publicly available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/hisdacus. HISDAC-US contains historical gridded settlement layers derived from property records compiled in the Zillow Transaction and Assessment Dataset (ZTRAX). HISDAC-US describes the built environment of most of the conterminous United States back to 1810 at fine temporal (5 years) and spatial (250 m) granularity using different settlement measures.