You will recognize St. Paul's Catholic Church as St. Katherine's monastery, where Whoopi Goldberg hid out in Sister Act. Don't worry - the unsafe neighborhood around it was made up for the movie.
St. Paul's was constructed in 1880, under the leadership of San Francisco's first archbishop Joseph Sadoc Alemany. In the early 1970s, it provided shelter to United Farm Workers organizers during their efforts to unionize California's farmworkers, and during the 1980s and into the 1990s served as a sanctuary for refugees fleeing U.S.-sponsored conflicts in Central America.