New York’s first stamp dealers appeared in the early 1860s. Faber of Charleston, South Carolina, began collecting in 1855. The first postage stamp, Great Britain’s one-penny black, had been issued only in 1840 the first known American stamp collector, William H. Stamp collecting was a new fad in the 1860s. Sanders Zuckerman, who has been selling stamps in the area for fifty-nine years-the Daily News proclaimed him “a legend in the stamp business”-says collectors came from all over the world to buy and sell stamps. Entire buildings, like the Morton Building at 116 Nassau, were filled with stamp dealers. Some called the neighborhood the Stamp District. Much of it is lined with late-Victorian office buildings, their imposing masonry and cast-iron facades rising almost unnoticed above the frenetic retailing on their ground floors.įor roughly a century, from the 1860s through the 1970s, Nassau Street was the mecca of American philately-postage stamp collecting. Now largely a pedestrian mall, it winds south from its intersection with Park Row at Printing House Square to Wall Street. Nassau Street was named some time before 1696 in honor of William of Nassau, the Dutch prince who became King William III of England in a 1689 coup d’etat. “Nassau Street-where stamp collecting began.” (Old advertising slogan of the Subway Stamp Co., formerly of 111 Nassau Street in lower Manhattan)
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