Phillip Hibbard shooting miniature city. Most people relax after work by watching a little TV, working in the yard or reading the latest thriller. Mike Teffeteller builds miniature cities. “It started as a hobby,” he says. “I had a big extra room above my garage and I would build a city and skyscrapers and roads and whatever just for the fun of it. Some people build trains, I build cities.” Now, he works on his models in a suite of offices on the 15th floor of the Lamar Building, and his most frequent subject is Augusta, specifically areas where he thinks the city can do better. And though he builds his models strictly to scale, his vision is definitely oversized. “I tend to build things bigger than Augusta would build them, just so in 20 years they don’t have to build another one because it’s not big enough,” he says. That’s a luxury enjoyed by those who don’t have to wrangle financing, which might explain why, for the last few years, Teffeteller and his models have been camping out at the fringe of Augusta redevelopment instead of dead center. He’s made models for both the TEE Center and the Judicial Center during their location debates, and he has models of several other large-scale projects. His first Judicial Center project, however, probably did the most to draw attention to himself. “One Saturday, I thought that my next model was going to be where I thought that Judicial Center should be,” he says. “I thought it should be downtown just to bring more people downtown.” The first place he settled on was the JC Penny building on Broad Street. It was old, historic, not too far gone, and there was a parking deck in the back. “So I came up with this model and I sent a letter to the editor of the Metro Spirit,” he says.
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The paper with that letter found its way into the hands of Bonnie Ruben, owner of the Ramada, who was intrigued by the possible use for the old property and displayed the model in the hotel. “This was my first connection with someone prominent from downtown,” Teffeteller says. That model kick started the idea of doing a kind of Hard Rock Cafe-type of restaurant featuring James Brown memorabilia, which would have been directly across Broad Street from the James Brown statue. The concept, and the resulting model, was strong enough to earn Teffeteller an audience with the Godfather of Soul himself. “I had 30 minutes with him,” he says, obviously still a little dazzled by the memory. “He said he had just come from somewhere where he was with the Queen, Keith Richards and Rod Stewart at a party. It may not have been true, but it sounded good.” Teffeteller got some pictures of Brown by the model, but the project failed to move forward. Though disappointing, the exercise wasn’t a total loss: enter — or reenter — Kelley New, Gene Holley’s designer (see “Playground in the Clouds” in the April 28 issue of the Metro Spirit) who, like his former boss, the owner of the Lamar Building, wasn’t afraid to think big. New had an idea for putting condos below the Fifth Street Bridge. “He gave me this look like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’” New says. The Fifth Street Bridge Condo idea became Teffeteller’s first commissioned job, and it happens to link to several other projects the two, now business partners, have since envisioned, including a use for the depot property, which the commission has expressed a desire to sell.
Their idea for the depot project comes from Jacksonville Landing. It features a combination hotel and conference area and includes shopping, dining and entertainment. “With all the people coming into town for the conventions and the Masters, it would give people some place to go and something to do,” Teffeteller says. “They do the SPLOST every few years, and I think this would be a lot better idea than a ballpark. They would get more traction out of this. They would get some tax revenue out of this.” These models — and there are several — are by no means easy to make, and such detail does not come cheap. “I don’t play golf,” he says, laughing that his wife has only a rough idea of what it all costs. It’s a laugh any married person knows means she has no idea at all how much it all costs. A single model, he says, can cost upwards of $9,000. Did he mention he didn’t play golf? When he first started, he would make as much as he could from scratch — from cardboard and balsa wood and spray paint, but now he buys as much as he can because when you’re building models of large buildings, it’s quicker if you don’t have to build each window. Buying, however, doesn’t mean buying off the rack at the local hobby shop. He started doing that, but he quickly learned the value of earmarking the wholesale catalogs and repurposing key items that are commonly found, but easily and effectively adapted. His dramatic, dazzling Las Vegas citywithin-a-city model, for example, utilizes fence post tops, shaving cream lids and champagne glasses to create a modern urban playground, complete with five hotels, a double racetrack (an oval track that goes under a road track), a stage for outdoor shows and an indoor ski slope similar to the famous one in Dubai. That such runaway dreams are held together with basic Elmer’s glue is more than a little ironic. “Mostly, it’s Elmer’s glue,” he says, “but sometimes, if we’ve really got to hold something together or glue something in a hurry, we’ll use Super Glue or hot glue.” He brings out an industrial-sized bottle of glue and opens up a bunch of plastic boxes containing windows and doors and trees of all different styles and sizes. Having re-created Woodrow Wilson House and the Hampton Terrace Hotel, which is currently showcased in the museum at the North Augusta Municipal Center, Teffeteller and New are obviously craftsmen able to capture the look and feel of a place (the model for remodeled Sutherland Mill is particularly lifelike). Teffeteller, who works for a box distributor, says he puts in about six or
seven hours each Saturday, but he also obviously devotes a considerable amount of time to the idea of urban planning, something usually left to people with degrees in the field. “I had aspirations to be an architect, but never had the math skills to get all the way through that,” he says. “But I was able to draw pictures and build models.” He went to school at USC-Aiken, but couldn’t get the idea of urban planning out of his head. “A lot of those things, I can just see what I want to do and I don’t even have to draw a picture of what it’s going look like,” he says. “I have to draw a floor plan to the scale that I want to build.” Augusta has no shortage of people with vision and good ideas. Some, like Jay Weigle and Yahya Henry, who recently took a PowerPoint before the commission touting a loft project meant to attract and keep the area’s best and brightest, are good at stating the problems, while dreamers like Teffeteller and New and former Commissioner Andy Cheek, are better suited at laying unsolicited projects before the community. Others, like the professionals who put together the Westobou Vision Master Plan, are full of facts and studies and showy presentations. It’s the professionals, however, who end up getting the handshakes. Oddly enough, Cheek’s Ellis Street Canal project actually ran up against one of Teffeteller’s Judicial Center projects, which was either serendipity or proof that these projects, while earnest and creative, are not as far “out of the box” as they some might believe. In many ways, Teffeteller’s models are like National Geographic’s illustrations of space travel back in the 1960s — informed but speculative. Of all the plans, Augusta Tomorrow’s master plan, produced for Augusta and North Augusta by ICON Architecture’s
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