Soyka Cinema

5580 NE 4th Court,
Miami, FL 33137

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Additional Info

Previous Names: Mercury Theatre

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The Mercury Theatre was an experiment by opening an art house in 1999 in this slowly gentrifying section of Overtown, Miami. It was not a success and by 2002 it became the Soyka Cinema and then closed a year later.

Contributed by Al Alvarez

Recent comments (view all 4 comments)

Louis of Pompano
Louis of Pompano on September 1, 2008 at 8:43 am

Al,

This area is known as Morningside. Overtown ends in Wynnwood, which ends where the Design District currently resides. The area north of channel 10 and south of Little River is known as Morningside. Miami’s Morningside Park is just a few blocks away on NE 55th Terrace.

Although us old timers ie" “Natives” still use these neighborhood names. Miami’s original neighborhood names have gotten lost over time. It seems that the only ones which have retained their original names are Overtown, Wynnwood, Allapatah, Miami Shores, and Liberty City. Little River has now metamorphisized itself into Little Haiti. Like Little River, some of the other neighborhoods, such as Riverside have been renamed and are known as something else, ie: Little Havana, etc.

Al Alvarez
Al Alvarez on September 1, 2008 at 9:15 am

Miami Shores and El Portal were separate cities, at least back when I lived there.

What you call Morningside I used to know as the Puerto Rican section of Overtown. I always though the Mercury effort was part of that Design Destrict “chic” party crowd.

David_Schneider
David_Schneider on January 11, 2016 at 4:38 pm

The three guys who ran the Mercury/Soyka had been running the Absinthe House Cinematheque in Coral Gables when they opened their second location, the Mercury.

I walked by the Soyka a year or so after it closed and the space was a fitness club or gym. I don’t know what it is now.

The Absinthe, Mercury, and Astor Art Cinema were the places to see foreign and independent films in Dade county in the 90’s before all closed. Today new theaters fill that need: Coral Gables Art Cinema, the three branches of O Cinema, the Bill Cosford, the Miami Beach Cinematheque, the Tower. (The Tower had been around for decades but was renovated and taken over by Miami-Dade College and began showing a variety of foreign/independent fare.)

One of the owners of the Mercury told me back at the time it opened that some of the seats had come from the defunct Riviera on US-1 in Coral Gables near South Miami.

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