BOSTON — The Fort Point waterfront is about as child-centered as ground gets in Boston. The Boston Children's Museum anchors one end; a short walk away sits Martin's Park, the inclusive playground the city built in memory of Martin Richard, the eight-year-old killed in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Over the past five weeks, it has also become one of the more dependable places in the city to find a used syringe.

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.

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.About two miles away, 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 a couple of miles away; its residents keep photographing them on the Fort Point waterfront.

Martin's Park was built as a place for children, in memory of a child this city lost. Right now, Boston cannot keep the syringes out of the blocks around it.