By Emily Rose | May 11, 2024 | Somerset City
At 9:47 p.m. on a rainy Thursday, the software engineer and the retired nurse took the floor. Neither spoke. Around them, 40 other pairs moved in close embrace beneath vintage chandeliers, their steps measured against the slow exhale of a bandoneón. The music came from a single speaker perched on a paint-splattered scaffold—but inside the former textile warehouse on Morrill Street, the acoustics carry surprisingly well.
This is El Encuentro, a 12,000-square-foot tango venue that has, since February, turned one of Somerset City's grittiest industrial blocks into something else entirely.
From Abandoned Warehouse to Dance Floor
The building sat empty for six years before Marco Alvarez and Priya Nadeem signed the lease. Alvarez, 41, teaches Argentine tango at a studio across town; Nadeem, 36, runs a small commercial real estate firm specializing in adaptive reuse projects. They met at a milonga in Boston in 2022 and spent the next 18 months looking for a space large enough to build what Alvarez calls "a room where the dancing is the only architecture."
"It had to be cheap enough to fail," Nadeem said. "And ugly enough that we could make it ours."
They paid $340,000 to acquire and stabilize the structure, then spent another $80,000 on refinished flooring, a modest HVAC system, and the chandeliers—salvaged from a demolished hotel in Providence. Alvarez painted the murals himself: portraits of tango legends Carlos Gardel and Ástor Piazzolla, and a timeline of the dance's evolution from 1880s Buenos Aires to present-day Somerset City.
The first milonga, on February 3, drew 23 people. By April, Thursday and Saturday nights were averaging 75 to 90 dancers, with a $15 cover charge that covers the space's operating costs but not yet its founders' loans.
Why Tango, Why Now
The crowds at El Encuentro do not fit a single profile. On a recent Saturday, attendees included a 28-year-old physical therapist, a 61-year-old retired firefighter, a doctoral student in economics, and a pair of line cooks who discovered tango through YouTube during the pandemic. What unifies them is less demographic than physical: the dance requires sustained proximity, shared weight, and attention so concentrated that phones rarely appear.
"Tango is the opposite of everything else in my week," said David Okonkwo, the software engineer, during a break between tandas. "You cannot do this while thinking about a Slack message."
The timing is not accidental. Since 2022, tango enrollment at established U.S. schools has risen markedly, according to the International Argentine Tango Congress, which reported a 34% increase in festival attendance between 2022 and 2023. Dance historians attribute part of that growth to a post-pandemic craving for unmediated physical connection.
"After isolation, people want rituals that demand presence," said Dr. Elena Voss, a dance historian at Wesleyan University who has studied social dance revivals. "Tango's structure—the embrace, the improvisation, the etiquette of the milonga—offers that in ways a nightclub cannot."
The Regulars
Laura Chen, 64, the retired nurse, started tango at 58, two years after her husband died. She now drives 40 minutes from Westbrook for El Encuentro's Thursday milongas.
"I tried book clubs. I tried hiking groups," Chen said. "This is the first place where nobody asks what you used to do for a living. They ask if you dance salon or nuevo."
For Okonkwo, 33, the appeal is technical. He spent his twenties in competitive ballroom dance and switched to tango after a knee injury made explosive movement difficult. At El Encuentro, he found a community that values restraint.
"In ballroom, you're performing for judges," he said. "Here, you're performing for one person. And ideally, not even that."
What Comes Next
Alvarez and Nadeem are careful not to overreach. They have discussed adding afternoon classes for beginners and a small café operation in the warehouse's front bay, but neither plan has a timeline or funding secured. A tango academy, mentioned in early promotional materials, remains aspirational.
"We want to be here in five years," Nadeem said. "That means growing slowly."
For now, the expansion is cultural rather than physical. Local jazz musicians have begun sitting in with recorded tango orchestras during Saturday milongas, and Alvarez is in early conversations with the Somerset City Arts Council about a cross-disciplinary performance in
