Leaving lost wages: with furniture manufacturing moving overseas, Las Vegas bets on winning the world's biggest market--High Point's.

• Author: Martin, Edward

The cool quiet of the marble stairway to the Radio Building's mezzanine contrasts with the carnival atmosphere outside on Main Street. A performer on stilts sidesteps a woman leading a pig. It wears a vest advertising a furniture maker. High Point, banners on lampposts proclaim, welcomes Sri Lanka, Netherlands Antilles, Haiti. Men and women in suits scurry by, clutching order books and chattering in foreign tongues.

The nine-story Radio Building is old, built in 1922 as headquarters of Commercial National Bank, its mahogany trim and other features restored to past grandeur. High Point's furniture market is even older, dating to 1909. Like almost every inch of available space downtown, the mezzanine doubles as a furniture showroom this week. Nearby stand the 13-floor International Home Furnishings Center, with 3.5 million square feet--80 acres, the size of a small farm--and the Showplace convention center, smaller but striking with its arches and wavelike roofline.

Market officials estimate that 80% to 90% of downtown buildings--188 of them, big and small, new and old, with tax value totaling nearly $700 million--are part of the show. Twice a year, it brings to town more people, from across America and 110 foreign lands, than live here. It's the world's largest furniture marketplace, where manufacturers introduce their lines and buyers for retailers place their orders--the spring show for what will be in stores this fall and the fall show for next spring--and no event in North Carolina equals its economic impact, boosters say. The furniture shows are here because this is where the industry was centered. Once.

Now, the High Point market's future is in jeopardy. Las Vegas, 2,000 miles distant and light years away culturally, has set its sights on attracting the tens of thousands who swarm to each High Point show by building a new home for the market and leveraging its advantages in entertainment, accommodations, restaurants and glamour. With furniture manufacturing spreading around the globe, going to Las Vegas can make as much sense to buyers as a trip to High Point.

This morning at the end of April, a man and woman are talking in the Radio Building mezzanine. Liz Zimmermann is vice president of sales of Presidential Seating, a Commerce, Calif., chair maker. She lowers her voice, as if confiding a secret. "Las Vegas will eventually be the only one. It won't happen overnight. It'll be gradual. A lot of the big guys--the North Carolina manufacturers--aren't going to go quite yet. But it'll happen eventually."

Talk like that is everywhere this market, heard on buses, in restaurants, over cocktails: Can tradition and grit stand up to location and glitz? "Las Vegas is for people who mix entertainment with business," says Paul Toms, chairman and CEO of Martinsville, Va.-based Hooker Furniture. He's also chairman of the International Home Furnishings Market Authority, which organizes the High Point shows. "Most people here aren't interested in anything but a good meal and going to bed after putting in 12 hours a day at the market."

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Las Vegas might be the Entertainment Capital of the World, but it's not the Furniture Capital of the World. It has 120,000 hotel rooms, but it doesn't have an 80-year-old, four-story building in the shape of an ornate chest of drawers, complete with handles. It has a mammoth airport served by all major airlines, but the only furniture distinctly...