Needles Next to the. St Francis House Sign

We found two images of needles laying next to the St. Francis House sign, by the front door to their main building on 39 Boylston St. Both of these images are from the BOS:311 service where citizens can request city services including “needle cleanup.” The two images are from the following two reports respectively

They are included below:

The needle is hard to see on the second image. Zoom in on the orange strip on the ground, near the image center. The second report is marked “Resolved. One syringe recovered.” The first report is marked “no syringes was recovered.”

These reports are from December of 2020 and May of 2021 respectively. They’re likely not the only cases in those years, but the two cases where needles were reported, and photographed, and the photograph included the sign and caught our attention. We downloaded 2022 data to see if there were cases more recently. We found 12 reports for year 2022 that were within roughly one block of Saint Francis House (filtered using coordinates). Some of these have photos as well but none of the 2022 photos include the sign:

For reference, we took a picture of the St. Francis House entrance at 39 Boylston St. The red circle indicates the area where we believe the above images were taken. Photo taken by a volunteer for Charlestown Voice on April 9 2023:

We found these images using simple search on the BOS:311 page, inspired by the work on the Boston Needle Map which we discuss in the Research section.

Page last updated on December 26, 2023