Nassau Street’s name honors William of Nassau, the Dutchman who became England’s King William III after a coup d’etat in 1689. Today, it’s largely a pedestrian mall, winding from Printing House Square near Pace University to Wall Street. But not so long ago, Nassau Street was the Stamp District, the mecca of American philately, where collectors could find entire office buildings, such as no. 116, filled with dealers.

People began collecting postage stamps shortly after Great Britain first issued them in 1840. The first known American collector, William Faber of Charleston, S.C., started in 1855. By the early 1860s, New York’s earliest dealers were in the open air near City Hall Park, pinning stamps on boards for perusal by passersby.

An English immigrant, John Walter Scott (1845-1919), made Nassau Street the center of American philately. In 1863, he arrived to find no jobs and much of lower Manhattan in ruins after the July 1863 draft riots. Scott persuaded an outdoor dealer to advance him about $100 worth of stamps, which Scott would sell as an agent. He soon earned $30 a month, more than enough then for a single man to live on. After Scott’s sister began buying stamps for him in England and mailing them on to New York for resale, he went into business for himself.

In June 1867, Scott published a one-page monthly price list. Within 18 months, he had opened a Nassau Street office from which issued a paperbound booklet, “A Descriptive Catalogue of American and Foreign Postage Stamps, Issued from 1840 to Date.” Scott loved massaging the figures: By counting each single page list as an edition of his catalogue, he boasted that this pamphlet was the 16th edition. He also published a book with blank pages on which collectors might affix their stamps, calling it a stamp album, and claimed he had sold 15,000 copies, despite the fact that there were not then 15,000 philatelists in the world.

Scott then launched the “American Journal of Philately” which he proclaimed America’s first stamp magazine. This was untrue: Conman S. Allan “Just-As-Good” Taylor, whose office was just off Nassau at 11 Ann Street, had started the “Stamp Collector’s Record” in December 1864.

Taylor, a counterfeiter, insisted his stamps were “just as good” as the real ones. Indeed, his finely engraved forgeries were often more elegantly produced than the crudely typographed genuine articles. Leg end dictates the feds made his counterfeiting rap stick because, in the technical sense, his stamps were better than the real thing.

And he had style. One of Taylor’s bogus Canadian stamps bore his hand some portrait. And years before El Salvador, Guatemala, and Paraguay were issuing stamps, Taylor’s so-called “Boston Gang” was peddling bogus stamps from those countries, with his magazines building the market for them with fictitious articles.

Another Nassau Street hustler was Sam Singer, the faker. Philatelists define a fake as a genuine stamp altered to hide a defect or resemble a much more valuable stamp. Damaged stamps are worthless.

Singer could successfully assemble a half-dozen mangled bits of postal paper into a single fake worth thousands. By the end of his career, Singer had become so proficient that he occasionally bought his own fakes from other dealers, not realizing they had passed through his shop.

When millionaire collector Colonel E. H. R. Green found he had paid full price for one of Sam’s specials, he spent $22,000 on a magnifier that enlarged a stamp’s image from 1 inch to 4 square feet. The movers had to remove the doorframes to bring it into the colonel’s 90th Street townhouse.

In this century, perhaps Nassau Street’s best-known dealer was Herman Herst. In 1932, he began working as a runner for Lebenthal & Comunicipal bond brokers. He often met Lebenthal clients who collected stamps between clipping coupons. He began buying and selling stamps as a vest-pocket dealer and left Wall Street for Nassau Street in 1936 when he realized his stamp business yielded twice his Lebenthal salary.

A relentless self-publicist, he published a newsletter and numerous columns and articles in the philatelic press. He became so famous in hobby circles that he welcomed an elevator operators’ strike: It let him catch up on his paperwork.

Eventually, he recycled his journalism into popular hobby books: “Nassau Street,” his memoir of stamp dealing, has sold more than 100,000 copies since 1960.

But Herst was among the first to abandon Nassau Street. In 1945, he moved to Shrub Oak, N.Y. (pop. 674), causing the local post office’s immediate reclassification from third to second class because he received over 100,000 pieces of mail annually.

By the 1970s, taxes, commercial rents, and mail-order competition had driven most dealers from Nassau Street. Today, the Verizon Yellow Pages lists only three dealers in the Stamp District.