activity ahead, but the grounds were becoming increasingly disreputable. The Elysian Fields' tree-lined groves gained notoriety as "lovers' paths," where couples could discreetly express the sort of physical affection generally frowned upon in public. In 1844, New York lawyer/musician George Templeton Strong lamented in a (posthumously published) diary entry, "Hoboken's a good deal cut up and built up, but pleasant still; pity it's haunted by such a gang as frequents it; its [Elysian Fields] are sacred to Venus and I saw scarce anyone there but snobs and their strumpets. Walked on in momentary expectation of stumbling on some couple engaged in . . . 'the commission of gross vulgarity.'" The Elysian Fields were also notorious as a preferred suicide spot, with the semi-famous (composer S.H. Dyer and Colonnade proprietor Michael McCarty) and the unknown among the victims. According to the Jersey Journal in 1884, "The bodies of suicides found dangling from the trees and those washed ashore during the past three decades would give the [Elysian] Fields a startling record as a morgue, as during that period more than 300 corpses were found in that locality." Decline By the early 1870s, as Hoboken's waterfront become more industrial and the neighborhood more run-down, the allure of the Elysian Fields, the Colonnade, and Sybil's Cave as tourist attractions began to fade. By this time, all of the founding fathers of the grounds — the Stevens patriarchs — had died, the last, Edwin Augustus Stevens, in 1868. The original Stevens family plan to build the grounds to attract buyers of Hoboken real estate had been successful, and the Elysian Fields no longer served that purpose. With the construction of two significant baseball parks enclosed by fences in Brooklyn in the early 1860s (the Capitoline Grounds and Union Grounds), enabling promoters to charge admission to games, the prominence of the Elysian Fields as a baseball and cricket venue began to wane. The St. George Cricket Club, which had relocated from the Elysian Fields to Hoboken's nearby Fox Hill, left the latter grounds in 1865 to secure playing space in New York. In 1868, the leading Manhattan baseball club, the New York Mutuals, shifted its home games from the Elysian Fields to the Union Grounds. The completion of Central Park in the 1860s gave New York residents a Manhattan-based alternative to crossing the Hudson for relaxation and amusement in a landscaped meadow. (Ironically, the city