Now, except for the LaSalle building at the corner of Broadway and Olive Street, where a Tennessee developer is constructing a Hotel Indigo, Hayden owns the entire block bounded by Broadway and Sixth, Locust and Olive streets.

When Hayden first started working on his plan for the Gallery Villas, “people thought I was crazy,” he said. It all started as an effort to provide parking for Hayden’s Gallery 515 in the Millennium tower on the same block. His tenants there walk a few blocks to the nearest parking structure.

The old Mercantile Library building had been sheathed in the 1950s as part of a trend to “modernize” the ornamental facades of old buildings, and subsequent owners, including the defunct Pyramid Construction, knocked out many of the interior walls.

Even though the sheathed exterior of the buildings matched, “those buildings have five different types of design and engineering to them,” Hayden said. His Brandonview LLC, which acts as its own general contractor and does much of the architectural work in house, spent the last three years leveling the different floor heights and building six levels of car ramps through the center of the buildings, an effort Brandonview foreman Fritz Hoffarth called “an endeavor.”