added stands to accommodate spectators. The New York Cricket Club was organized at McCarty's Hotel (the Colonnade — see below) on October 11, 1843. The earliest known, documented cricket match at the Elysian Fields was in July 1844, between the St. George's Cricket Club and the New York club. The St. George CC, which was formed in Manhattan in 1838, made the Elysian Fields their home grounds in the 1850s. In 1859, an international cricket match was held at the Elysian grounds with an All-England Eleven as part of an English tour of North America. Pioneering sports journalist Henry Chadwick, then a cricket reporter for The New York Times, regularly attended baseball matches at the Elysian Fields in the 1850s. (It merits mention that many athletes of this era excelled at both sports.) "After watching a particularly spirited contest between the Gotham and Eagle clubs of New York on the grassy grounds of Elysian Fields in Hoboken," wrote Chadwick biographer Andrew Schiff, "Chadwick came away a changed man." He became one of baseball's earliest and most vocal proponents, writing regularly about the sport for the next 50 years (for which he was eventually inducted into Baseball's Hall of Fame). Chadwick recalled: "I chanced to go through the Elysian Fields during the progress of a match between the noted Eagle and Gotham Clubs. The game was being sharply played on both sides, and I watched with deeper interest than any previous ball match between clubs that I had seen. It was not long before I was struck with the idea that base ball was just the game for Americans." Chadwick's epiphany was not isolated — it was during this decade that newspapers began to carry accounts of local games. In fact, according to Tom Gilbert, "Clubs made up of newspapermen played at the Elysian Fields in the 1850s and 1860s; in 1871 a baseball diamond was set aside for them exclusively." In 1865, the Elysian grounds hosted a championship baseball match between the Mutuals and the Atlantic Club of Brooklyn that was attended by an estimated 20,000 fans. The event was immortalized in an apocryphal Currier & Ives lithograph, The American National Game of Base Ball (which historians agree does not reflect a journalistic portrayal of the game, the players, or the Elysian Fields; it is a "fantasy" reimagining of the event). In 1870, hooligans frequently attempted to disrupt amateur matches.