Come and See.

There would have been dancing and music and soul food.

Above all, the “Hot Corner” would have been alive.

“Things were always happening on the ‘Hot Corner,’” said Lynn Green, theatre assistant for the Morton Theatre. “You had music spilling out from the Morton and people hustling and bustling.”

Formed by the intersection of West Washington and Hull Streets in downtown Athens, and bordered by Wilson’s Soul Food on one side and the Manhattan Café and the Morton on another, the “Hot Corner” has played a role in the life of black culture over the last century.

“It was the center of African-American life,” Green said.

In the historically segregated area, the space — little more than a block — became one of celebration and liberation.

On display were not only shops and street life, but also the Morton’s own attractions, which have included, over the years, films, stage shows and a burlesque.

Before the mass appeal of television and home entertainment, it was Morton that brought people out at night.

"In order to be entertained, one still needed to dress-up and head out to the ‘Hot Corner,’” said Calvin Smith, a university alumnus and performer, who opened the Morton’s centennial season last year.

As with much else in the area, the decades took their toll.

By the ‘70s, the “Hot Corner” had lost much of its place in the culture of the city that surrounded it: the Morton had been dark for decades behind locked doors, left behind by the eponymous family that had once owned it, due to a violated fire code. The Manhattan, too, was long gone.

One-by-one, the businesses that had installed themselves in the Morton’s building, including the Bluebird café and several doctor’s offices, closed down or moved elsewhere.

“The face of it changed,” Green said.

For years, the space — shrunk down from a block to nearly nothing — lay dormant and unnoticed.

“I come down her a lot,” said Daniel Reynolds, a student at the university majoring in history. “But I’ve never noticed anything special about — what’d you call it? — ‘the Hot Corner.’”

And then someone, or rather someones, arrived to remember what had come before.

Every year, during the first week of May, the Hot Corner Association organizes a festival in commemoration of the mini-district’s past life in the city.

The group, headed up by businessman Homer Wilson, hopes to both revitalize and inspire, focusing on the corner’s legacy in the years since.

The “Hot Corner” is dead, but it is not gone.

New growth booms at the intersection of Washington and Hull:

The Morton is once again spilling out with music as performers and groups trek back to the renovated space; around and across from it, businesses have reopened and replaced the ones before: the Trapeze pub, Brown’s Barber Shop and Casa Mia, among others.

And along the streets, people are bustling.