Paula Roberts Rome, a public relations business owner who selected the food court vendors to open Harborplace in 1980, died of pancreatic cancer Sunday at her Roland Park Place home. She was 84.

Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Jack and Patricia Roberts, she moved to Baltimore as a child. She attended Park School and was a Forest Park High School and Smith College graduate.

With partner Hillary Jacobs, she founded Aidus-Rome, later Paula Rome & Associates, a public relations firm that handled the American Craft Council, Ringling Brothers Circus and Disney on Ice.

In 1972 she and a friend, Connie Caplan, co-wrote the dining section of “Bawlamer: An Informal Guide to a Livelier Baltimore,” published by the Citizens Planning and Housing Association.

They searched out pit beef stands and the homemade mayonnaise at the Woman’s Industrial Exchange. Ms. Rome described the old downtown Horn & Horn restaurant as “consistently good, cheap food, filled with noisy politicians.”

She also wrote a “Roaming” dining column for Baltimore magazine.

By the end of that decade, Ms. Rome was recruited as a professional food taster for the then-under-construction Harborplace.

A 1979 New Yorker article by food writer Calvin Trillin noted how Ms. Rome sampled fried green peppers at the old Gunning’s Crab House in Brooklyn and discovered a smoothie called a Flying Fruit Fantasy at the Frederick County Fair.

In a Baltimore Sun article, also in 1979, she recalled how visiting food purveyors throughout Maryland was hard work. She said she discovered many good foods but had a classification she called, “No, no, a thousand times no.” She described the experience as “a real grind.”

Over the years she served on the boards of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore School for the Arts, Maryland Film Festival, the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts, University of Maryland Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center, SEED School of Maryland and the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies.

“Paula is an angel,” said William Gilmore, former chief executive officer of the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts. “She had a lovely smile and a twinkle in her eye. She had flair and a sense of style and color. She selected her own fashion colors well — and she was a worker.”

She was a past chair of the Civic Design Commission and helped select the art displayed in the Baltimore subway stations.

In 1961 she married attorney Stuart Rome, who died in 1983. In 1998 she married Anthony “Tony” Hawkins, a Rouse Co. executive and former Harborplace general manager.

“I could not ask for a better partner,” said Jacobs, her business associate and friend. “Everything was fun and the experiences were positive. We were a great team.”

Ms. Rome and her husband enjoyed summers on the Magothy River. She designed and made jewelry.

Survivors include her husband, Anthony Hawkins; her daughters, Laurie Rome and Susan Rome, of Baltimore, and Nancy Rome, of Denver; and a grandchild. A daughter, Shannon Hawkins, died in 2012.

Services were held Tuesday at Sol Levinson & Bros.