Jon Favreau is getting to relive his youth by bringing the Stark Expo into Iron Man 2. While the movie uses it as a dramatic backdrop for family secrets and complicated legacies, Jon gets to go home:
"With the Expo I got to revisit where I grew up, which was across the street from Flushing Meadows Park -- the whole Stark Expo is in Flushing Meadows Park, the old World's Fair fairgrounds. I grew up looking out my window at the remains of the 1964 World's Fair, and this was a way to represent that in our story. It's a love letter to Queens -- and Queens doesn't get a lot of love."
As for the movie, the Expo died along with Tony's father and, according to Jon
"Now Tony is reintroducing this concept of the Expo at the start of the film and it's presented a part of peace dividend -- now that Iron Man is keeping the world 'safer,' this is Tony's way of turning guns to butter and changing the conversation about the future."
The biggest part of the LA Times article on the Expo is the following excerpt:
WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILER AHEAD
The filmmaker said that the fabricated history of the Stark Expo will echo in other Marvel films, too. "It does figure in to the other films because in the Captain America movie you're going to see the early one, which I think is a lot of fun," Favreau said. "They're going to have a reference to Tony's father, Howard Stark, played by John Slattery, and his earlier Expo. But I don't want to say more than that."