Martin's Park, the Seaport playground built for Marathon-bombing victim Martin Richard, 8. Park photo via Google Maps. Inset: a syringe reported in the seawall along the Fort Point Channel nearby — citizen photo via Boston 311.

Between June 20 and July 24, residents logged 17 needle-cleanup requests within a few hundred yards of that waterfront, according to Boston's own 311 records — and the pictures they attached leave little to the imagination.

Syringes a resident bagged and reported on the Fort Point pier off Necco Street. Citizen photo via Boston 311.

The worst of it is a single spot on the Fort Point Channel that one neighbor reported four separate times in a month — "another needle, same spot," reads the June 26 entry — before logging it again on July 19 as an "abandoned needle (sharp) at dock." On July 23, another syringe turned up a short walk away, on the same channel-side blocks.

Nearby, the reports stop being about needles alone. At Congress Street and Dorchester Avenue on July 21, one resident described a "homeless encampment and trash and needles"; another, the same day, wrote simply that "there is an outdoor drug party underway."

None of this is confined to Fort Point. Boston is now logging roughly 36 needle pickups a day — more than 1,000 in the past month — with the syringes reaching Back Bay, Beacon Hill and the North End. But this stretch of the Fort Point waterfront — the one that is home to the Children's Museum and Martin's Park — is a particular kind of indictment, because of what the city chose to put nearby and what it cannot keep off the ground.

Less than a mile to the southwest, on Albany Street, the Boston Public Health Commission runs AHOPE, a free needle exchange that — as MDN reported — hands out roughly 80,000 needles a month to active users, part of the harm-reduction approach Mayor Michelle Wu's administration has embraced even as its plans to clear and treat the Mass and Cass encampments keep collapsing. The city gives out those syringes by the tens of thousands on one waterfront; its residents photograph them on another.