Marcus Owen is 64. He has played the cello on the eastbound platform of the 16th & Mission BART station every weekday morning between 7:30 and 9:00 since November 1994. He has been legally blind since age 7, when an undiagnosed retinal detachment in both eyes destroyed his central vision. He has roughly 8% peripheral vision in his left eye and none in his right.
He was trained at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he graduated in 1985 on a full scholarship. He was second cello in two regional orchestras in the 1980s, both of which folded, the East Bay Sinfonia in 1991 and the Pacific Chamber Players in 1993. He has not auditioned for a new orchestra in thirty-two years. He plays the platform.
The cello is a 1962 Eberle workshop instrument, German-made, given to him by his teacher’s widow in 1986. The case is a soft black canvas thing he has had since 1990. The cello’s setup, by his own description, has not been adjusted in nineteen years. He says it knows him.
Marcus has a regular morning route. He gets on the J-Church at Noe and 25th at 6:42, transfers to the BART at Dolores Park, and arrives at 16th & Mission at 7:24. He is at his spot, third pillar from the eastern end of the platform, by 7:32. He plays until 8:54. He takes the eastbound train at 8:58 home. He has done this approximately 7,800 times.
He plays a rotation. Bach’s Cello Suites on Mondays. Saint-Saëns on Tuesdays. Folk and traditional pieces on Wednesdays, Irish reels, old American hymns, occasionally a Korean lullaby a friend taught him in 2003. Thursdays are improvisation; Marcus plays whatever the platform asks for. Fridays are requests, taken in writing, dropped into the case. He plays them in order.
“The platform is a room with the walls made of people,” he says. “When the walls are quiet, the music has somewhere to go. When the walls are loud, the music goes nowhere and that is also fine. I am not playing to fill silence. I am playing because it is 7:32.”
Marcus knows every BART transit officer who has worked the 16th Street station in the last two decades by voice. He greets them by name. The officers know him; in 2007, when a city ordinance briefly threatened buskers in BART stations, the union of officers wrote a one-page letter to the BART board asking for an exception for “Mr. Owen, who is part of the platform.” The exception was granted.
On a typical morning Marcus makes between $44 and $128 in tips. He keeps a small ledger in Braille of the daily total. He has, over thirty-one years, made a documented total of approximately $312,000 from the platform. He owns no car, no house, no health insurance other than Medicare; he rents the same one-bedroom in Noe Valley he has rented since 1996.
He has refused two record-label inquiries and one short-film documentary. He says recordings change the playing. He plays for the room.
In November 2020 Marcus did not play for six weeks because of a respiratory illness, undiagnosed but not COVID, that left him unable to draw a long bow. The platform regulars noticed. A handwritten “get well, Marcus” sign appeared taped to the third pillar. By the time he returned in early January, the sign had been replaced four times by different anonymous regulars. He kept the third one. It is on his bedroom wall.
On the Friday I visited, Marcus played a request from a woman who had dropped a folded napkin into the case. The napkin said: “Please play something for my brother who died in February. He liked Bach.” Marcus played the Prelude from the First Suite. The platform got slightly quieter. The eastbound train pulled in. About a third of the people who got on did so without looking at their phones. Marcus did not notice; the music does not depend on whether anyone is listening. He finished at 8:53. He packed the cello. He took the 8:58 home.
