Island and the Isle of Meadows, both of which belong to the borough of Staten Island.

The Arthur Kill is an abandoned river channel carved by an ancestral phase of the Hudson River resulting from the blockage of the main channel of the Hudson at the Narrows by moraine or an ice dam. The size of the Arthur Kill channel is large, suggesting that it was, for a time, the primary drainage from the region. However, it could not have been a primary drainage for long because the river did not have enough time to carve a broad flood plain.

The name Arthur Kill is an anglicisation of the Dutch language achter kill meaning back channel, which would refer to its location “behind” Staten Island and has its roots inthe early 17th century during the Dutch colonial era when the region was part of New Netherland. Place naming by early explorers and settlers during the era often referred to a location in reference to other places, its shape, its topography, and other geographic qualities. Kill comes from the Middle Dutch word Kille, meaning riverbed, water channel, or stream. The area around the Newark Bay was called Achter Kol. During the British colonial era the bay was known as Cull bay. The bay lies behind Bergen Hill, the emerging ridge of the Hudson Palisades which begins on Bergen Neck, the peninsula between it and the Upper New York Bay. The sister channel of Arthur Kill, Kill van Kull refers to the waterway that flows from the col or