ON THE RECORD : El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora, La Reina de Los Anxieties

If you’ve got the feeling that L.A. is a city on the verge of a nervous breakdown, your fears are well grounded. And now they’re well documented. Just stop by USC and ask to see Anthony Anderson’s collection of books and documents, titled “Los Angeles--A City in Stress.” Thumb through the “Report on Estimated Short-Term Losses in Direct Visitor Spending as a Result of the Recent Civil Unrest” or “Assessment of the Performance of the California National Guard During the Civil Disturbances in Los Angeles” or Amnesty International’s controversial report, “United States of America: Torture, Ill-Treatment and Excessive Force by Police in Los Angeles, California.”

These are just a few of the thousands of pages documenting the city’s recent woes that Anderson, a 41-year-old USC librarian, has tracked down over the past two years. The collection includes material on crime, gangs, homelessness, post-Cold War recession--almost all the problems that have helped make the city an icon of 1990s urban ills.

“I was going to call it ‘L.A.: An Awful Place to Live,’ ” jokes Anderson. “Actually, I love Los Angeles. I wanted to collect everything I could about those problems. I thought that might help people understand them and maybe even solve them someday.”

“This will be the historians’ first stop” for researching L.A. in the early 1990s, Anderson says. The collection is available to the rest of us as well.

Anderson has yet to add anything about that other great stress-maker, the Northridge earthquake. “But,” he says, “it was another good example of the city in stress, so I guess I’ll have to. I just hope we don’t have too many other things happening any time soon. This collection could get out of hand.”