The reason we don't have any of the old hotels is because of the way old hotels were originally constructed. Hotels that were built in the early 1900s has very small rooms with low ceilings and only a few bathrooms per floor. This is why they were not preserved and converted to apartments or used for other purposes. On the other side you have old office and warehouse buildings what have been preserved and converted into apartments and hotels. These buildings had open floor layouts and high ceilings which could easily be molded and used for other purposes.
That isn't entirely true...perhaps for the VERY old hotels of the type you describe, and the smaller ones....but we did have some of the same kind of large old hotels that still exist in other cities, that just didn't make it to modernization here. The Leamington, the Curtis, The original Radisson. Well, actually they did get modernized. All of those got all kinds of oddly modified in the 50s/60s, which is maybe why they didn't make it back around to renovated "historic hotels". Oh, and also The Nicollet Hotel of course! None of these 4 I mentioned were like the ones you describe...The Nicollet didn't have any extensive funky modernizations in the 50s/60s like the others did either really, though the larger version was built a bit later than the others mentioned. They would kind of be our smaller version of the Palmer House, Hilton or Blackstone on South Michigan in Chicago.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/59662214@N06/6136609624/
Here is the Lileks page on old hotels. Some of the smaller older ones were like Nick said...difficult to translate to modern hotel, but the larger ones could have easily still been around. Though they could have also still been around as sort of trashy versions of their former selves, kind of the Kahler in Rochester, excluding the top couple floors that they have actually put money into. Who knows what would have happened.
http://lileks.com/mpls/hotels/index.html