Alice Greenwald, 9/11 Museum Director, Girds for Challenge

Alice Greenwald knows full well what she could be in for as she maps out a memorial museum at ground zero.

She watched last year as an outspoken group of relatives of 9/11 victims drove two cultural organizations from the site. She is well versed in the security concerns that led architects to redesign the Freedom Tower as a virtual fortress, worries that some family members share about Ms. Greenwald's future museum and the World Trade Center Memorial itself.

And as a former director for museum programs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, she understands the complexities involved in presenting indescribably horrific events in recent history.

But over lunch on Tuesday, her second day as director of the World Trade Center Memorial Museum, Ms. Greenwald said she hoped her museum would take shape with some level of consensus. And — her restrained blazer and pearls notwithstanding — Ms. Greenwald, 54, came across as a soldier ready for battle.

"The question is how do we get it right, and who makes final decisions about it," she said. "We're not going to please everybody."

So far she has been spared the brickbats. She has already hired Jan Seidler Ramirez, who previously worked at the New-York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York, as director of collections and chief curator. Ms. Ramirez knows the territory, having worked for the last year and a half as a consultant on the museum with a group established by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.