[In the 1990s,] New York's industrial base was not like the vast steel mills of Pennsylvania or the car plants of the Midwest: it was not dominated by one industry or type of manufacture. Instead, there was a panoply of hundreds of firms dedicated to small-scale and often custom production. The city produced everything from ships for the navy to ladies' garments to chewing gum, and it printed books and newspapers in great quantities. This variety added to the city's sense of vibrant, kaleidoscopic pluralism, but in leam times its dark sides were more visible: the sprawling factory floors of the Midwest bred alienation but also mass solidarity, while small shops honeycombed the city with jealously held fiefdoms, reinforcing ethnic parochialism as one immigrant group or another dominated a trade and saw it as their birthright.
— John Ganz: When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
Salvatore "Sal" Fragione is the Italian owner of a pizzeria in Brooklyn. A neighborhood local, Buggin' Out, becomes upset when he sees that the pizzeria's Wall of Fame exhibits only Italian actors. Buggin' Out believes a pizzeria in a black neighborhood should showcase black actors, but Sal disagrees. The wall becomes a symbol of racism and hate to Buggin' Out and to other people in the neighborhood, and tensions rise.