An Earth Day Icon, Unmasked

The 1970 photograph became an instant environmental classic, but its subject has remained nameless until now

By Timothy Dumas
Smithsonian magazine, August 2010

On the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, a mood of boisterous celebration filled the particulate-dense air of New York City. Mayor John V. Lindsay traveled around by electric bus. In a speech at Union Square he asked, “Do we want to live or die?”A crowd of 20,000 packed the square to catch a glimpse of Paul Newman standing on a raised platform. Stretches of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street, closed to automobile traffic, were transformed into pedestrian seas, amid which office workers set down picnic blankets and girls handed out fresh daisies. Activists hauled nets of dead fish through Midtown streets. “You’re next, people!” they cried. “You’re next!”

Out of all the hubbub that beset the nation that day 40 years ago—a day when students buried trash-filled caskets and put a Chevy on trial for polluting the air—one image would capture the spirit with particular efficiency and wit. It’s a black-and-white photograph of a young man wearing a vintage gas mask as he stretched to smell the magnolias. Reproduced instantly and ever since, it came to symbolize the occasion. (This magazine, which made its debut in April 1970, published the picture in its 20th-anniversary issue.)

But the photograph presents a few substantial mysteries. For one, there’s no record of who took it. The credit line reads simply “Associated Press,” and the AP’s files identify the photographer only as a “stringer,” or freelancer. For another, though a few newspapers printed the young man’s name with the picture at the time, he too was soon rendered anonymous.

So who was that masked man?

Now it can be told, or retold: his name, resurrected from a Pace College publication dated 1970, is Peter Hallerman. He was then a sophomore at Pace, commuting to its Lower Manhattan campus from Queens. In all these years, he says, he has never been interviewed about the event in question.

As he recalls, he was one of about 30 Pace students who held what was surely one of the day’s puniest demonstrations. They crossed the street from their campus to a park near City Hall and chanted slogans and waved brooms, some of them daring to make a sweep or two. (Their permit forbade them to actually clean the park.)

At least the collegians had planned for maximum impact: they demonstrated at lunch hour, hoping the City Hall press corps would straggle out to gather a bit of Earth Day color. “We figured we’d at least get noticed,” Hallerman says. “Whether it would be reported on was something else.”

Sure enough, a handful of journalists appeared. In a dramatic flourish, Hallerman strapped on a gas mask that he believes his mother, Edith, had saved from her service with the Red Cross during World War II. (Though gas masks were a common Earth Day accessory, this long-snouted beast looked particularly awful.) The AP photographer posed Hallerman in front of a blossoming magnolia tree, then changed his mind. “Try leaning over and smelling those flowers,” Hallerman recalls the photographer saying. Hallerman bent his six-foot frame over a short fence surrounding the tree so that the mask’s proboscis touched the pink-white blossoms. The photographer snapped his shot, and Hallerman thought nothing more of it.\

WHO IS THE MASKED MAN???

IT'S HIM...