At four in the morning, Smith Hill belongs to the plow. The State House dome sits pale above the rooftops like a second moon, and the grades dropping toward Charles Street are the first pavement in Providence to turn slick. Rhode Island Snow Removal Services is built for exactly that hour: driveways opened, walks cut down to bare concrete, salt and sand laid where ice would otherwise set up hard by noon. When a storm stalls over the city and keeps stacking inches, the trucks come back around and take another pass, and another. By the time the first car noses out onto a cleared street, the work reads as though the snow simply skipped that address.