A London developer’s proposed private academic housing tower in the Fenway recognizes the property’s history as the home to a series of gay nightclubs, with plans that include a 120-seat LGBTQ-centric “Boylston Black Box” performing arts center.

Scape filed plans Thursday for the 15-story, 235,000-square-foot tower including 533 professionally managed apartments at 1252-1270 Boylston St.

Scape said its project would help ease the Fenway’s housing displacement crisis, which has been partly driven by an influx of off-campus student renters.

“Due to the major disparity in the neighborhood’s housing stock – a spectrum presently characterized by aging product that has reached the end of its useful life on one end, and luxury condominiums on the other – the academic population, the workforce and families are all competing for the limited amount of ‘middle-market’ neighborhood housing,” Scape executives Nigel Taee and Andrew Flynn wrote in a project notification form to the Boston Planning and Development Agency.

Scape said it has ground-leased the 1252-1268 Boylston St. property, which includes the Machine nightclub, and plans to acquire 1270 Boylston St., currently occupied by the Baseball Tavern. The 2-story buildings would be replaced with the Gensler-designed tower, which would include 16,325 square feet of ground-floor retail. The project would retain the existing 15 on-site parking spaces and include 267 bicycle storage spaces.

Scape said it did focus groups with local stakeholders in drawing up plans for the 6,000-square-foot performing arts space, and met with potential users including The Theater Offensive, the Gold Dust Orphans, the Boston Arts Academy and Fenway Health. Along with the 120-seat theater, the double-height space would include flex space for meetings or catered food and beverage service.

A 2018 BPDA study spotlighted the shrinking options for community arts groups’ performance spaces because of rising real estate values.

This is the first U.S. project for Scape, which has opened a North American headquarters in the Seaport District and hired Flynn, a former Related Beal executive, as CEO of Scape North America. The company said it plans a billion-dollar pipeline of projects in Boston.