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How We Got Here uncovers the surprising stories behind everyday objects, strange inventions, iconic places, traditions and ideas—revealing the hidden history that shaped the world we live in today.

15/10/2026

Portland burned in 1866.

But after nearly 1,800 buildings were destroyed, another question remained:

Where did all the ruins go?

Some of the city was reused. Bricks were cleaned and stacked for reconstruction.

But huge amounts of broken brick, stone, ash and debris were carried somewhere else.

Back Cove.

At the time, the water reached much closer to downtown Portland. The city had already begun filling parts of it before the fire, but the disaster created a massive new supply of material.

Over time, some of that rubble helped expand the land that became modern Bayside.

So the Great Fire did more than change Portland’s buildings.

Part of the destroyed city became part of the ground beneath the next one.

That’s how we got here.

13/10/2026

Jerome Avenue existed long before the western Bronx became the dense urban corridor we know today.

Completed in 1874, the road initially passed through farms, estates and scattered development. The real transformation came when rapid transit arrived.

The Jerome Avenue elevated line opened in 1917, and by 1918 trains were connecting the corridor more directly with Manhattan. Apartment buildings, shops and new neighborhoods followed.

The Bronx population exploded from about 200,000 people in 1900 to more than 1.26 million by 1930. Jerome Avenue did not cause that growth alone, but the elevated railway made it one of the major corridors that helped absorb it.

A nineteenth-century road became a twentieth-century transit spine.

12/10/2026

Portland’s waterfront once reached much farther into the city than it does today.

Before Commercial Street existed, Fore Street sat close to the water, Clay Cove cut into the peninsula, and wharves and shipyards occupied places that are now dry land.

That changed in the early 1850s, when Portland filled sections of the harbor to create Commercial Street, a nearly mile-long corridor built for shipping, warehouses and railroad traffic.

The city didn’t simply develop beside the waterfront. It physically pushed the waterfront outward.

10/10/2026

Seattle did not simply build around its geography.

It erased part of it.

Around 1900, Denny Hill rose directly north of downtown Seattle. As the city expanded, the steep terrain became a problem for horses, wagons, freight and future development.

So engineers chose an extraordinary solution.

They blasted the hill apart with high-pressure water, moved millions of cubic yards of earth and lowered some parts of the landscape by more than 100 feet.

For a time, houses and even Denny Park were left perched high above newly lowered streets.

The transformation took decades, and the final major regrade was not completed until 1930.

Modern Belltown and the surrounding area sit on a landscape Seattle deliberately redesigned.

That’s how we got here.

09/10/2026

Portland’s Great Fire of 1866 didn’t just destroy the city. Some of the ruins became part of the city that came next.

The fire burned roughly 200 acres and destroyed more than 1,500 buildings, leaving Portland with an enormous cleanup problem. Much of the debris was dumped into Back Cove, where it became part of the fill that helped expand what later became Bayside.

Some bricks were salvaged and reused in reconstruction. Other wreckage disappeared beneath new ground.

One important distinction: Commercial Street was already being built on filled land before the fire, so the 1866 ruins did not create it.

The fire changed Portland above ground, and some of its remains helped change the shoreline below.

08/10/2026

The first Alaska Highway looked nothing like the road people drive today.

In 1942, after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military needed a land route to Alaska fast.

So Army engineers pushed more than 1,400 miles through forests, mountains, rivers, permafrost and muskeg.

In some places, they literally laid logs side by side across swampy ground just to stop vehicles from sinking.

More than 10,000 Army engineers worked on the road, including 3,695 African American soldiers serving in segregated units.

The rough pioneer road was completed in just over eight months.

Then came the rebuilding.

Civilian contractors widened it, straightened sections, added gravel and turned that emergency wartime path into something closer to the Alaska Highway we recognize today.

The road did not begin polished.

It began as an urgent military lifeline built from dirt, logs, gravel and endurance.

That’s how we got here.

07/10/2026

The Grand Concourse did not simply appear inside a finished Bronx.

It helped shape what the Bronx would become.

When the boulevard opened in 1909, much of the surrounding land was still lightly developed. Then subway access, apartment construction, population growth and major landmarks transformed the corridor into one of the borough’s defining urban spines.

By the 1920s and 1930s, the Grand Concourse was lined with new apartment houses, civic buildings, shops and some of the Bronx’s most recognizable architecture.

A road came first.

Then the city grew around it.

That’s how we got here.

04/10/2026

Seattle has an old city hiding beneath the modern one.

After the Great Seattle Fire of 1889 destroyed around 25 blocks, the city rebuilt quickly. But as new brick and stone buildings rose, engineers also raised parts of the street grid by anywhere from about 6½ feet to as much as 32 feet.

That left old entrances, sidewalks and lower floors below the new street level.

Some of those spaces became basements. Others survived as underground areaways beneath Pioneer Square, complete with old storefronts and glass sidewalk prisms that once brought daylight below.

Seattle didn’t build a secret underground city on purpose. It rebuilt at two different levels, and parts of the original one were left underneath.

03/10/2026

Portland viewers kept repeating the same unsettling story: that part of the city was built using earth from its oldest cemetery.

So we checked the records.

What we found is stranger than the legend in some ways, and less dramatic in others.

Eastern Cemetery really was cut into when Federal Street was extended after the Great Fire of 1866. Historical research suggests some graves were probably lost.

But the claim that thousands of bodies ended up beneath Commercial Street does not line up cleanly with the timeline. Commercial Street had already been created on harbor fill years earlier.

So what actually happened?

The truth sits somewhere between documented history, missing records, and a local legend that refused to disappear.

That’s how we got here.

03/10/2026

Part of Portland, Maine looks completely ordinary today, but sections of Bayside and the Marginal Way area were once part of a much larger Back Cove.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, Portland gradually filled tidal ground to create more space for railroads, commercial development and later major roads. Earth from elsewhere in the city, debris from the Great Fire of 1866, and later twentieth-century landfill all helped reshape the shoreline.

By around 1900, the edge of Back Cove had moved close to present-day Marginal Way, and later projects pushed it farther still.

The city didn’t just build around the water. It changed where the water ended.

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