Long before Mickey moved in down the road, Orlando teenagers had the Infinite Mushroom. It was where you bought your first black light, your first lava lamp and, for a whole lot of locals, your first concert ticket. The incense greeted you before the cashier did. The posters climbed every wall. And the women who ran the place for most of its 36 years were sharp, practical businesswomen who had zero interest in the lifestyle their merchandise winked at.
Grab a beanbag. This is the story of how a home-decorating store at Colonial Plaza became the city’s best-known head shop, why Genesis fans once mashed themselves against its front window, and how the lights finally went dark in 2004.
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How a Decorating Shop Became the Infinite Mushroom
It all started in 1963 with Decor on the Mall, an interior-decorating store at Colonial Plaza owned by Grace Lindblom. Her employee, Nancy Noyes, noticed some customers who definitely weren’t shopping for drapes. Teenagers kept wandering in, and what they wanted was incense.
Lindblom knew a trend when the cash register rang. On a buying trip to New York, she stocked up for her unexpected fan base with novelty buttons, flower-print pillows and celebrity posters. Noyes later remembered a Paul Newman poster as one of the early hits. Blue eyes sold, apparently.
In 1968, the business moved to another spot within Colonial Plaza and leaned all the way into its new crowd. Some later recollections put the start around 1966 or 1967, but the Orlando Sentinel’s 25th-anniversary coverage in 1993 and both of its 2004 closing stories point to 1968.
The Name Came From a 12-Year-Old
Forget the Madison Avenue brainstorm. The name came from a contest, and the winner was Ian Bailey, a 12-year-old seventh-grader and the son of a Rollins College drama professor. His prize was a $50 gift certificate, which in 1968 could buy a seventh-grader a serious stack of posters.
Decades later, Bailey was a drummer living in Austin, and he couldn’t quite explain how he dreamed up “Infinite Mushroom” in the first place. So any cosmic origin story you’ve heard about the name is just that, a story. Sometimes a kid simply has a gift for branding.
So Where Exactly Was It?
Ask three longtime Orlandoans where the Infinite Mushroom was, and you might hear three different answers. Funny thing is, they could all be partly right. The early chapters don’t line up perfectly, but here’s what the record supports:
- Colonial Plaza, 1963 to 1968: The 1997 interview with the elder Noyes places Decor on the Mall here, followed by the renamed store at a different Colonial Plaza location in 1968.
- Edgewater Drive and Princeton Street: A 2019 College Park retrospective puts an early Mushroom on the southwest corner, and Orlando Memory also mentions an original Edgewater store. The dates, and how that fits with Colonial Plaza, are still a mystery.
- Off Bumby near Robinson: Plenty of people remember the 1960s and ’70s shop on Colonial Plaza’s southeastern side, an outparcel near the old mall at Colonial and Bumby.
- 2915 E. Colonial Drive, 1986 to 2004: The final home was a strip center behind Peaches, near Fashion Square. Concert notices confirm the address by January 1987.
Later accounts can’t agree on what replaced it. Some say Chipotle, others say Jason’s Deli. The most reliable directions are still the old-school ones: 2915 E. Colonial, behind Peaches.
One Little Ad Says It All
A surviving newspaper ad from the Colonial Drive years packs the store’s later personality into a few square inches. It lists 2915 East Colonial Drive, uses “Behind Peaches” as the landmark, gives the phone number as 894-2481 and puts Ticketmaster Florida front and center. It also plugs Valentine cards and gifts from Recycled Paper Products. There’s no date on it, but the address places it sometime after the 1986 move.
Black Lights, Bell-Bottoms and Beaded Curtains
Walking into the Infinite Mushroom in the early ’70s was like stepping into every teenager’s dream bedroom. The shelves held black lights, fluorescent posters, incense, beaded curtains and lava lamps. The racks held tie-dye, bell-bottoms, halter tops and fringed leather jackets. And yes, there were smoking accessories, too. It was a head shop, after all.
One former employee, posting on Orlando Memory in 2024, remembered selling shirts, jeans and shoes around 1974, along with an in-store leather shop.
The inventory grew up alongside each new class of teenagers. By 1997, Korn, Weezer and Everclear shirts hung near Jim Morrison posters and lava lamps that simply refused to go out of style. Beanie Babies and dancing Coca-Cola cans had their moment in the sun. By the end, the store also carried body-piercing jewelry, cheeky greeting cards, gag gifts and a sizable adult section.
Yes, the Public Library Shopped There
Here’s a fun one, even for lifelong locals. In 1971, the Orlando Public Library’s Young Adult Department started lending posters to teens. Staff bought most of that stock from East West Records and the Infinite Mushroom, then had the posters laminated so they could survive endless checkouts.
So while some parents eyed the place sideways, the public library was quietly shopping there to make teenagers feel welcome. Peace, love and late fees.
Orlando’s Concert Ticket Headquarters
For plenty of Central Floridians, the Infinite Mushroom was never about the posters. It was about tickets, back when scoring a seat meant showing up in person, cash in hand, and praying the line moved faster than the show sold out.
A WLOF Channel 95 Top 40 pamphlet for February 28th to March 6th, 1970, preserved by Orlando Memory, already lists the Infinite Mushroom as a ticket outlet. By May 1977, the store was selling seats for the first Rock Super Bowl, a role the Orange County Regional History Center highlighted in its 2015 rock exhibit.
The systems behind the counter kept changing: Select-A-Seat in 1987, then Ticketmaster by the early 1990s. The waiting, not so much.
The Great Genesis Ticket Crush of 1987
On January 17th, 1987, tickets went on sale for Genesis’s February 28th show at the Florida Citrus Bowl. Some diehards had been camped out since Thursday evening for the Saturday sale. At the Infinite Mushroom, a crowd of several hundred pressed against the entrance and a plate-glass window, and Orlando police were called in. Somehow, no arrests or injuries were reported at the ticket-sale sites.
That July, owners Nancy Noyes and Wayne Wiener rolled out a fix: a numbered-stub system meant to end the overnight campouts. Fans would grab a stub on one day and come back for the actual sale. The landlords had demanded portable toilets and off-duty police for future big sales, and the owners said those costs just didn’t add up.
Of course, rules are one thing and rock fans are another. In February 1992, a Rollins student was gearing up to spend three nights outside the Infinite Mushroom for tickets to U2’s tour opener in Lakeland. Dedication, thy name is undergrad.
Two Nancys, One Shop
The ownership story comes with a built-in plot twist worthy of a soap opera: two women named Nancy Noyes, a mother and her daughter, ran the Infinite Mushroom at different times.
| Person | Role |
| Grace Lindblom | Founded Decor on the Mall in 1963 and steered it into the Mushroom. Some retellings spell her name “Lindbloom.” |
| Nancy Noyes (mother) | Early manager who bought the business with Wayne Wiener around 1980. Retired at 70 in January 1997. |
| Wayne Wiener | Co-owner alongside the elder Noyes. |
| Phyllis Johannes | Worked there at 17 in 1971, then bought Wiener’s share in 1992. |
| Nancy Noyes (daughter) | Took over her mother’s half-interest in 1997 and ran the shop with Johannes until the end. |
Whatever the reputation, the owners stayed consistent on one point. The elder Noyes and Lindblom said they never used the drugs associated with the store, and in 2004, Johannes and the younger Noyes waved off the idea that running a head shop meant living like hippies. Selling tie-dye, it turns out, is a retail job like any other.
Run-Ins With the Law
Selling counterculture at the Infinite Mushroom came with some headaches. The ownership change around 1980 lined up with a Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation crackdown on paraphernalia, and legal pressure nudged surviving head shops toward gifts and novelties.
In 1984, the elder Noyes, Wiener and employee Richard Rodgers were arrested over the sale of allegedly obscene greeting cards to minors. They were reportedly led away in handcuffs in front of TV cameras, all over greeting cards. The available histories don’t record how the case ended, so the arrests are where the documented story stops.
Why Orlando’s Original Head Shop Closed
On January 8th, 2004, the owners announced they were closing the Infinite Mushroom. They pointed to growing competition, a lease they were about to lose and the challenge of finding a new spot whose neighbors would welcome the merchandise.
The neighborhood had changed, too. Johannes said business dropped sharply after Peaches closed. Service Merchandise packed up as well, and shoppers kept drifting toward newer malls on the edges of town.
The math was hard to argue with. Merchandise sales had neared $800,000 around 2000, not counting the Ticketmaster concession, but slid to less than $400,000 by 2003. A staff that once peaked at 10 employees was down to four.
Even the goodbye took its sweet time, as regulars came back for one last look at the lava lamps. In January, the plan was to stay open through Valentine’s Day and maybe the end of February. On February 27th, 2004, the liquidation sale was still rolling, with closing expected the following week. To this day, nobody has pinned down the exact last day of business.
Last Call for Lava Lamps
The best-known celebrity tale comes from Sara Brady, who worked at the Infinite Mushroom in the 1970s. She recalled Tina Turner coming in to shop for clothes and saying Ike had recommended the place. It’s one eyewitness’s memory rather than a documented visit, but what a memory.
Most stories are smaller and sweeter: a first black light, a bedroom finally decorated just right, a teenage job behind the counter or a chilly night on the sidewalk waiting for tickets. Former customers and employees still add those memories to the Orlando Memory page, and the History Center gave the shop its moment in the spotlight in 2015.
From Paul Newman posters in the ’60s to Korn shirts in the ’90s, the Infinite Mushroom spent 36 years as the place Orlando’s kids could call their own. The storefront is long gone, but mention the name to anyone who grew up here before 2004 and watch them smile. Odds are you’ll get a story, and maybe the faintest whiff of patchouli.
🔥 Want more Orlando history just like this? Well, there's plenty more where this came from, right here.
Sources:
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/1997/01/08/store-owner-reflects-on-30-groovy-years/
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2004/01/08/hippie-shop-to-close/
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2004/02/27/lava-love-story-2/
https://orlandomemory.org/places/infinite-mushroom-colonial-plaza/
https://orlandomemory.org/places/young-adult-department-1979s/
https://www.yourcommunitypaper.com/articles/snaps-from-the-past-2/
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2015/04/09/history-center-explores-orlando-rock-era/
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/1987/01/18/genesis-fans-rock-ticket-outlets-show-sells-out-in-6-hours/
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/1987/07/15/mushroom-bans-ticket-camp-outs/
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/1992/02/14/you-too-can-see-band-u2-if-you-feel-up-to-waiting/
