Contemplating what Sam DiBattista has accomplished in Bellevue is enough to make any progress-hungry Pittsburgher consider the upside of human cloning.

But the more you find out about the recent successes along Lincoln Avenue, the more you realize that any community-boosting cloning would have to encompass more than just a handful of people. Though it's tempting to look at DiBattista's expansion as simply one ambitious man's moves on a life-size Monopoly board, it turns out that DiBattista has turned his solo vision into a group endeavor. At this point, he's getting by with a little help from his friends.

The chef/owner of Vivo restaurant at 565 Lincoln Ave. and proprietor of the Affogato coffeehouse at 613 Lincoln has just purchased the old G.C. Murphy building at 517-521 Lincoln and intends to make it once again a department store.

DiBattista set his sights on the Murphy building as soon as it went on the market, but "we had no way of buying it," he said forthrightly. Even so, he managed to get owner Andy Sutton to travel from Wisconsin for a private tour of Bellevue.

"We showed him Vivo, the club downstairs, Affogato and Frankfurter's" -- the hot dog shop his brother-in-law, Marty Armstrong, opened across the street, DiBattista said.

"Maybe it was some nostalgia, but [Sutton] didn't want to see another big national chain go there," he said. "And he liked what we're doing in Bellevue."

Sutton lowered his price from about $300,000 to $250,000 but even then, "it was way beyond our means."

One evening at Vivo, a regular patron happened to overhear DiBattista discussing these challenges with a business partner. The patron approached them and asked how much money they needed. The answer was $100,000. "He wrote us a check," DiBattista marveled.

Like Sutton, the anonymous patron from Ben Avon "likes what we're doing in Bellevue," DiBattista said. "He's what they call an 'angel investor.' He said, 'I don't want to lose this money, but I'm not in any hurry to get it back, either.' "

So DiBattista acquired the building a couple of weeks ago and is hoping to open part of it any day now as a re-imagined department store. It will be stocked with all the expected products, but with a twist: They'll be one-of-a-kind items, vintage pieces and local artisans' handiwork. It won't be a collection of luxury boutiques like New York's venerable Henri Bendel emporium, nor yet another dollar store for the borough, but a midpriced magnet for the region's middle class.

The acquisition process is just the latest instance of serendipity in what could look -- if you don't look any further -- like a charmed life. Another involves Andy Rubacky, the business partner helping DiBattista put together the department store project. He's the reason why Affogato is still open.

The coffee shop was struggling to stay afloat when the two men struck up a friendship over the coffee counter. DiBattista asked him to take on the task of turning Affogato around. "If he'd said no," DiBattista said, "I would have just closed it."

"I didn't want to see the place go away," Rubacky said, "because Bellevue needs a coffee shop."

He suggested a Web site for Affogato and thought to use "what people were already calling it" -- www.bigreda.com -- because of the single, red, attention-getting letter "A" on the facade. Together, the men trimmed staff, reducing payroll from nearly 60 percent to 30 percent of the shop's gross income.

If this entrepreneurial chef has found the recipe for success, it seems to include vision, hard work and a little luck -- combined in hard-to-measure quantities.

And as with most small-business gamblers, there's always an element of risk. Even the survival of Vivo, his flagship establishment, "got a bit hairy for a while" as a dozen high-end restaurants opened in recent years, he said. But Vivo has recently passed the industry's five-year benchmark for success or failure.

Failure? "I never think about that," DiBattista said, even though finances are "a little bit of a stretch right now."

"I'm hoping for a return [on the investment] sooner than 10 years," he said. "I'm a businessman. I'm in business for business' sake."

What you can't help but notice, though, is that as much as he wants to provide for himself and his family, his vision benefits the entire community.

The same could be said of several other Bellevue businesses, of course. Indeed, for decades before Sam DiBattista moved to town, some longtime enterprises, especially Fred Dietz Floral and Lincoln Bakery, held on while economic downturns came and other places folded. They stayed and prospered and, in recent years, have even expanded.

Their viability made Bellevue ripe for a newcomer like DiBattista to size up the possibilities, embark on his visionary course and persuade others to join his quest. DiBattista's story does show the difference that one person can make, even as it demonstrates that no one can accomplish it alone. What other struggling communities need is a visionary -- and people willing to support a viable dream.